Million Man March Organizer Benjamin Chavis Muhammad Is A Member Of Phi Beta Sigma

Did you know that civil rights leader Benjamin Chavis Muhammad is an honorary member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.? The fraternity has long counted the veteran activist among its distinguished honorary Sigmas.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. was born on January 22, 1948, in Oxford, North Carolina, into one of the state’s most prominent Black families; his ancestor John Chavis was a Revolutionary War soldier and an early African American educator. Chavis showed his courage young. In 1960, at age 12, he became the first African American issued a library card at his hometown’s segregated public library. By 1963, while still a high school student, he had begun his career as a statewide youth coordinator in North Carolina for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In 1971, while working to desegregate the schools of Wilmington, North Carolina, Chavis and nine others were arrested and wrongfully convicted of arson and conspiracy. Known as the Wilmington Ten, they were declared political prisoners by Amnesty International. As the oldest of the group, Chavis received the longest sentence and spent years in prison before the convictions were overturned in 1980 for prosecutorial misconduct. He used his time behind bars to write two books, and after his release he earned a Master of Divinity from Duke University and a doctorate from Howard University.

Chavis went on to become a pioneer of the environmental justice movement, helping popularize the term “environmental racism” and overseeing the landmark 1987 report on toxic waste and race. In 1993, he was named the youngest-ever executive director of the NAACP. Two years later, he served as National Director of the 1995 Million Man March, one of the largest gatherings in American history, and he later joined the Nation of Islam, adopting the surname Muhammad.

Today, Chavis serves as president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, representing more than 200 Black-owned media companies. His decades of service reflect the values at the heart of Phi Beta Sigma, founded at Howard University in 1914 on the motto “Culture for Service and Service for Humanity.”

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