Chavis << CHAY vihs >>, Benjamin Franklin, Jr. (1948-…), was executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from April 1993 to August 1994. Before he took this position, Chavis had served as director of the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ.
The NAACP’s board of directors dismissed Chavis as the association’s executive director after he agreed to settle a legal dispute with a former NAACP employee by paying her a large sum of the organization’s money. The employee had threatened to sue Chavis for sexual harassment. Chavis agreed to the payment without the board’s knowledge. Some board members also opposed Chavis’s attempts to establish ties between the NAACP and Louis Farrakhan, the controversial leader of the Nation of Islam (see Farrakhan, Louis).
Chavis was born on Jan. 22, 1948, in Oxford, North Carolina. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina in 1970. In 1972, he and nine other civil rights activists were wrongly convicted of setting fire to a store in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a result, Chavis spent about four years in prison, from 1976 to 1980. A federal appeals court overturned the convictions in 1980. While in prison in 1980, he earned a master’s degree from Duke University’s divinity school. That same year, he was ordained a minister of the United Church of Christ. He received a doctor of ministry degree from Howard University in 1981. He became deputy director of the Commission for Racial Justice in 1981, and he was named executive director in 1986. In 1997, Chavis became a minister of the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Benjamin Chavis Muhammad.
