At the age of 23, Benjamin Chavis rose to international prominence in 1971 as the leader of the Wilmington Ten in NC, civil rights activists who were unjustly convicted of committing arson.
46 Facts About Benjamin Chavis
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Benjamin Chavis later served in 1995 as the National Director of the Million Man March, and the Founder and CEO of the National African American Leadership Summit.
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Since 2001, Benjamin Chavis has been CEO and Co-Chairman of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, in New York City which he co-founded with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.
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On June 24,2014, Benjamin Chavis became the president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an African-American organization which focuses on supporting and advocating for publishers of the nation's more than 230 black newspapers.
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In 1960 at the age of twelve, Benjamin Chavis became the first African American to be issued a library card at the segregated public library.
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Benjamin Chavis graduated from Mary Potter High School in 1965 and entered St Augustine College in Raleigh as a freshman.
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Benjamin Chavis earned a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
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Benjamin Chavis was a leader of the Wilmington Ten, who all were convicted of arson during a civil rights protest in the city for school desegregation.
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Benjamin Chavis received his Master of Divinity from Duke University and a Doctor of Ministry from Howard University.
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Benjamin Chavis was admitted into the PhD program in Systematic Theology as a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary of Columbia University and completed all of the academic course requirements in 1984.
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In 1963, while a high school student, Benjamin Chavis became a statewide youth coordinator in North Carolina for Martin Luther King Jr.
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In 1968, Chavis worked for the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy.
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In 1970 following the killing of 23-year-old Henry Marrow and the acquittal by an all-white jury of the three men indicted on charges, Benjamin Chavis organized a protest march from Oxford to North Carolina's State Capitol Building in Raleigh.
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Benjamin Chavis was appointed Field Officer in the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in 1968.
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Benjamin Chavis was ordained in the United Church of Christ in 1980 and in 1985 he was named the executive director and CEO of the UCC-CRJ.
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The oldest man at age 24, Benjamin Chavis drew the longest sentence, 34 years.
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Benjamin Chavis drew from this experience in his books: An American Political Prisoner Appeals for Human Rights and Psalms from Prison.
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In 1978, Benjamin Chavis was named as one of the first winners of the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.
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In 1982, Benjamin Chavis coined the term environmental racism during environmental justice protests in Warren County, NC.
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Benjamin Chavis writes in the forward of a 1993 testimonial of the environmental justice movement:.
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In 1986 Benjamin Chavis conducted and published the landmark national study: Toxic Waste and Race in the United States of America, that statistically revealed the correlation between race and the location of toxic waste throughout the United States.
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Benjamin Chavis is considered by many environmental grassroots activists to be the "Godfather of the post-modern environmental justice movement" that has steadily grown throughout the nation and world since the early 1980s.
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In 1988, Benjamin Chavis was elected Vice President of the National Council of Churches.
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Benjamin Chavis served as chairman of its Prophetic Justice unit as a Minister of the United Church of Christ.
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In 2013, Benjamin Chavis began writing weekly columns for the National Newspaper Association.
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Theologically, Benjamin Chavis has worked for decades on identifying the common points of unity between the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
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Today, Benjamin Chavis continues to work on ecumenical and interfaith matters across the United States and throughout the world.
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In 1993, Benjamin Chavis was selected as the executive director and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the youngest to hold this office.
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Benjamin Chavis first joined the organization at the age of twelve as a youth leader of the Granville County, North Carolina NAACP Branch.
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Benjamin Chavis traveled to a Los Angeles, CA housing project to "get to the heart of the issue," stating that in economically deprived areas, youth often go from childhood to adulthood with no adolescence because of the economic demands.
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Benjamin Chavis said that "environmental racism" was a life-and-death issue and noted the work of the NAACP to end it.
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Benjamin Chavis said that often people of color were excluded from decisions on public policy.
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In 1994, Benjamin Chavis set the NAACP's focus on economic empowerment to ensure a strong economic infrastructure for the African-American and other communities of color.
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In May 1994, Benjamin Chavis led the NAACP and other organizations in sponsoring a youth summit to seek solutions to the drugs and violence in their communities.
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In 1994, Benjamin Chavis convened summit conferences of civil rights leaders in Baltimore in August and in Chicago in December.
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Benjamin Chavis served as executive director and CEO of NAALS from 1995 to 1997.
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In 1995, NAALS appointed Benjamin Chavis to serve as the National Director of the Million Man March Organizing Committee that conceived, designed, arranged and promoted the Million Man March.
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Benjamin Chavis wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column Civil Rights Journal from 1985 to 1993.
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The journey into the hip-hop culture actually had its roots for Benjamin Chavis dating back to 1969 when he was the proprietor and regular "DJ" and "MC" for The Soul Kitchen Disco in his hometown of Oxford, North Carolina.
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Benjamin Chavis joined "Sex and the City" star Cynthia Nixon, actor Bruce Willis and Russell Simmons to demand adequate funding for education across the state of New York.
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Benjamin Chavis was a spokesperson for TI's Respect My Vote campaign, and introduced TI's performance at the 2008 FAMU Homecoming Concert in Tallahassee Florida that was hosted by FAMU and Blazin 102.3.
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In 2007 Benjamin Chavis headed H3 Enterprises and the HipHopSodaShop, the first hip-hop corporation that soon opened two shops in Tampa and Miami, Florida.
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Benjamin Chavis was the president of Education Online Services in Fort Lauderdale, until he retired to accept other opportunities for professional advancement.
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Benjamin Chavis serves as the senior strategic advisor to the Diamond Empowerment Fund in New York.
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Benjamin Chavis is a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.
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Benjamin Chavis has told an interviewer he reads books on chemistry, for pleasure.