Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr.
Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. was born January 22, 1948. He is an African American civil rights leader, community organizer and faith leader.
Dr. Chavis grew up in the city of Oxford, North Carolina, Benjamin Chavis was a member of one of the most prominent African American families in North Carolina. His parents were well known educators and his ancestors included John Chavis, a Revolutionary War soldier with George Washington’s Army who became one of the first African Americans to attend Princeton University. John Chavis later operated a private school in antebellum North Carolina that accepted both black and white students. John Chavis, according to Benjamin, was killed in 1838 for teaching slave children to read and write.
As a twelve-year-old, Chavis effectively desegregated his hometown's whites-only public library, becoming the first African American to be issued a library card in the town's history. Chavis graduated from Mary Potter High School in 1965 and entered St. Augustine College in Raleigh as a freshman. In 1965, while a college freshman, Chavis became a statewide youth coordinator in North Carolina for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He also joined CORE, SNCC and AFSCME.
He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (1969).
After working in the civil rights movement and serving time in North Carolina's prison system as the leader of the Wilmington Ten, Chavis received his Master of Divinity (magna cum laude) from Duke University (1980) and a Doctor of Ministry from Howard University (1981). Chavis was admitted into the PhD program in Systematic Theology as a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and completed all of the academic course requirements.
In 1968, Chavis also worked for the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. After his graduation from UNCC in 1969, Chavis returned to Oxford and taught at the Mary Potter High School, still all black even though the courts ordered school desegregation. In 1970 following the murder of 23-year-old Henry Marrow and the acquittal by an all-white jury of the two men who killed him, Chavis organized a protest march from Oxford to North Carolina's State Capitol Building in Raleigh. Following the Oxford to Raleigh march, Chavis organized a black boycott of white businesses in Oxford that lasted for 18 months until the town agreed to integrate its public facilities, including schools.
Ben Chavis was appointed as the Southern Regional Program director for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice UCC-CRJ. Chavis’s work with this organization brought him to Wilmington, North Carolina in 1971 to assist in the campaign to desegregate the city’s public school system. In 1972 Chavis and nine other individuals were arrested and later convicted of conspiracy and arson. They became known as the “Wilmington 10.” Chavis’s eight year incarceration received international attention. He also wrote two books there: Psalms from Prison and An American Political Prisoner.
In 1971 the Commission for Racial Justice assigned Field Officer Chavis to Wilmington, North Carolina to help desegregate the public school system. Since the city abruptly closed the black high school, laid off its principal and most of its teachers, and distributed the students to other schools, there had been conflicts with white students. The administration did not hear their grievances, and the students organized a boycott to protest for their civil rights.
Chavis and nine others were arrested in February 1972 charged with conspiracy and arson. Following a controversial trial, the entire group were convicted in 1972. The oldest man at age 24, Chavis drew the longest sentence, 34 years. The ten were incarcerated while supporters pursued appeals. The case of the Wilmington Ten received massive international condemnation as a political prosecution. In December 1980, the Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial and overturned the original conviction because of "prosecutorial misconduct."
In 1978 Amnesty International described Benjamin Chavis and eight others of the Wilmington Ten still in prison as “American political prisoners” under the definition of the Universal Rights of Man and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were prisoners of conscience. From this experience Benjamin Chavis wrote two books: An American Political Prisoner Appeals for Human Rights (while still in prison) and Psalms from Prison. In 1978, Chavis was named as one of the first winners of the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.
Dr.Chavis received his ordination in the United Church of Christ in 1980.
In 1981, he coined the term environmental racism: “Racial discrimination in the deliberated targeting of ethnic and minority communities for exposure to toxic and hazardous waste sites and facilities, coupled with the systematic exclusion of minorities in environmental policy making, enforcement, and remediation.” To prove the validity of his definition, Chavis in 1986 conducted and published the landmark national study: Toxic Waste and Race in the United States of America, that statistically revealed the direct correlation between race and the location of toxic waste throughout the United States. Chavis is considered by many environmental grassroots activists to be the “father of the post-modern environmental justice movement” that has steadily grown throughout the nation and world since the early 1980s.
In 1985, Chavis became the executive director of the United Church of Christ and CEO of UCC-CRJ. In 1993 Chavis was selected to become the Executive Director and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). At 45 he was the youngest person to hold both posts. During his brief controversial term at the helm of the NAACP Chavis called for programs that would address crime and economic issues that had been ignored by the group. He also steered it toward the environmental justice movement that he had launched a decade earlier.
Chavis was forced to resign his NAACP position sixteen months after he took office when it was revealed that he used NAACP funds for an out-of-court settlement of a sexual harassment charge.
He forged a close relationship with Louis Farrakhan and was national director of the Million Man March, the huge civil rights rally that came to Washington,DC in 1995. After becoming a Muslim, Chavis was appointed the East Coast regional minister of the Nation of Islam.
"It's the same God," Muhammad said of his decision to switch faiths. "I just come at it from a different theological perspective."
His next career move came in 2001. With hip-hop celebrity Russell Simmons, Muhammad founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a coalition of musicians, civil rights activists and others that aims to educate at-risk youth about important life issues, such as personal finance, through the musical language they know best. He serves as its president and chief executive.
On December 31, 2012, Chavis and the surviving members of the Wilmington Ten were granted Pardons of Innocence by North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue. The New York Times editorialized for the pardons of innocence for the Wilmington 10 as the case had become an international cause celebre as a case of virulent racist political prosecution.
Chavis currently serves as the CEO and President of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA).Dr. Chavis is based at his office in Manhattan, where he works with Russell Simmons, as well as his office in Washington, DC, the headquarters of the NNPA.
Information sorces:
washingtoninformer.com/martha-rivera-chavis-53-wife-of-nnpa-president-ben- chavis-dies/
solidarity-us.org/node/2960
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/13/AR2006041301825.html
notablebiographies.com/Ch-Co/Chavis-Muhammad-Benjamin.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Chavis
blackpast.org/aah/muhammad-reverend-benjamin-chavis-1948
The Wilmington 10: North Carolina Urged to Pardon Civil Rights Activists Falsely Jailed 40 Years Ago
Dr Benjamin Chavis on The Rock Newman Show
Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. on BBC HardTalk in London
Dr. Benjamin Chavis speaks at Washington DC Green Festival, Sunday September 30, 2012
Deep Speech from the movie Belly
Blood Done Sign My Name with Nate Parker & Dr. Ben Chavis
Dr. Ben Chavis, President of NNPA: The Power of the Black Press
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