Benjamin Chavis

Common card · No. 370186

Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. (born January 22, 1948) is an African-American activist, author, journalist, ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, and the current president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. He serves as national co-chair for the political organization No Labels. In his youth, Chavis was a youth coordinator and SCLC assistant to Martin Luther King Jr., who inspired him to work in the civil rights movement. At the age of 23, Chavis rose to international prominence in 1971 as the leader of the Wilmington Ten in North Carolina, civil rights activists who were unjustly convicted of committing arson. As the oldest of the ten, Chavis received the longest sentence of 34 years in North Carolina prisons. The Wilmington Ten convictions and sentences were appealed and overturned, and in 1980 all ten were freed by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals due to "prosecutorial misconduct." Chavis returned to graduate school and the field of civil rights...

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