Lifelong political activist Benjamin Chavis Muhammad (born 1948) overcame racial injustice and wrongful imprisonment to become a vocal leader in the civil rights movement. The former United Church of Christ minister and NAACP executive director converted to the Nation of Islam in February 1997.

The first political act of Benjamin Chavis Muhammad came when he was a wide-eyed 13-year-old. On his way home from school each day, Chavis Muhammad would pass a whites-only library in Oxford, North Carolina. One day, tired of tattered hand-me-downs and desirous of a book with two intact covers on it, he boldly walked into the library. The librarians told him to leave, but he questioned that demand. "He asked why," a childhood friend told the New York Times. "A lot of us when we were told to go away . . . would just do so, but Ben would always challenge, always ask why." The librarians called his parents, but the incident, like the spunkiness of the boy at its center, could not be calmed, and tempers flared. In a short time, the library was opened to all races. A child's simple act of disobedience and intellectual curiosity had shattered the overt racism of an institution whose sole mission, young Chavis Muhammad knew, should have been the enrichment of minds--those of blacks and whites.

Descended from Activists

Benjamin Franklin Chavis, Jr., was born in 1948 in Oxford, North Carolina, into a long and distinguished line of preachers. His great-great-grandfather, John Chavis, is considered to be the first black graduate of Princeton University because he graduated from a New Jersey seminary that later became the university. John Chavis, according to Benjamin, was killed in 1938 for teaching black children to read and write.

In the mid-twentieth century, even as the walls of segregation began to tumble, many racist elements thrived in the United States, particularly in the South. But even though the nation's military services were integrated in the year of Benjamin Chavis Muhammad's birth, and a judicial decision six years later struck down the practice of "separate but equal" education, closed-minded whites in some areas vehemently defended their racist institutions and laws. The world-views of civil rights leaders like Chavis Muhammad and Martin Luther King, Jr., were shaped against this backdrop of hatred and bigotry.

In 1968--the year of King's assassination, which some observers feel brought an end to the modern civil rights era--Chavis Muhammad became a field officer for the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. The Commission, organized in 1963 in response to the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the infamous Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing, coordinated racial justice strategies for national and regional organizations and spearheaded community organization and criminal justice campaigns.

In February of 1971, Chavis Muhammad was in Wilmington, North Carolina, to drum up support for a school desegregation lawsuit that had been brought by the NAACP. On a night of racial violence, one of many in a season of escalating tension, Mike's Grocery, a white-owned store in a black part of town, was firebombed. A year later, the Wilmington 10 (as the nine black men, including Chavis Muhammad, and one white woman came to be known) were convicted of arson and conspiracy and sentenced to a combined total of 282 years in prison, with the lengthiest term, 34 years, slapped on Chavis Muhammad.

World Focused on his Imprisonment

The case immediately garnered worldwide attention and became a celebrated focus of the civil rights movement in the United States. Defense attorneys cited 2,685 errors in the trial, but appeals were denied, and the convicted agitators went to prison in 1976. A year later, Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog agency, listed the ten as political prisoners. Ironically, the NAACP--the organization that Chavis Muhammad had joined when he was only 12 years old and would one day head--was seen by some as offering one of the weakest responses to the obviously wrongful convictions.

While in prison, Chavis Muhammad, who had been taught by King to see the positive in a negative experience, was frequently escorted in leg irons and handcuffs to Duke University, where he earned a master's degree from the divinity school under a study-release program. A disciplined student--he had taken his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1969--Chavis Muhammad dodged the prison's strict 10 P.M. lights-out rule by reading his school books in the bathroom, which was lighted all night.

The Wilmington 10 case took a dramatic turn when three principal prosecution witnesses from the trial admitted they had made up their stories after being pressured by local law enforcement authorities. North Carolina governor James Hunt reduced the sentences but left the convictions intact. Finally in 1980, after Chavis Muhammad and the other activists had been paroled, a Justice Department investigation led to a federal appellate court's reversal of the convictions. "Our case was a victory for the whole movement," Chavis Muhammad noted in Newsweek. "It showed people what is possible."

In 1983, two years after receiving his doctorate in divinity from Howard University, Chavis Muhammad returned to the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice as deputy director. (The commission was one of several groups that had championed the release of the Wilmington 10.) By 1985, Chavis Muhammad had been elected executive director of the commission and soon emerged as a national figure willing to exercise his preacher's oratory on a wide variety of racial and social justice issues in the United States. He organized gang summits to denounce the skyrocketing violence, high drop-out rate, and rampant drug involvement plaguing America's young people. He also participated in mainstream national politics, lobbying with other black leaders against U.S. aid to Angolan rebels fighting the Marxist regime of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and serving as the clergy coordinator for the Reverend Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign.

Pioneered Concept of "Environmental Racism"

During his tenure at the Commission for Racial Justice, Chavis Muhammad became most associated with the burgeoning environmental movement. In 1983 Chavis Muhammad had joined in a protest against the depositing of tons of contaminated soil in rural Warren County, North Carolina, where the population was 75 percent black--the highest concentration of black citizens in the state--and mostly poor. Although the Warren County battle was lost, the protesters succeeded in shelving the state's plans to put another landfill and an incinerator in the area. Chavis Muhammad, educated in school as a chemist and in the streets as an activist, saw the political issue clearly: industry's garbage was being foisted on the lower-class, politically unempowered members of society.

Coining the term "environmental racism," Chavis Muhammad ordered a study that documented the extent of the crisis: three of the five largest toxic waste landfills in the country were in minority neighborhoods. Chavis Muhammad spared few in his condemnation of this previously overlooked embodiment of racism. He chastised federal, state, and local governments; the mainstream environmental organizations, which were headed by whites and, in his view, cared more about the integrity of a wetland than the health of a black person; and big businesses that cavalierly promised jobs in impoverished communities in exchange for support of environmentally ruinous industries. "One of the responsibilities of the civil rights movement is to define the postmodern manifestations of racism," Chavis Muhammad explained in Ebony. "We must not only point to overt forms of racism, but also to institutionalized racism."

Speaking at the 1987 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, which was attended by activists, professionals, and politicians, Chavis Muhammad impressed upon conference participants the need to "rescue the environment from the clutches of persons and institutions gone mad with racism and greed," according to an account in Audubon. The summit cast much-needed light on the environmental devastation plaguing minority communities--not only those of African Americans, but of Mexican American farmers, Native Americans, and the indigenous peoples of Alaska. Chavis Muhammad thus became one of the most prominent spokespersons on environmental policy. After the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, Chavis Muhammad served as a senior advisor to the transition team studying the departments of Energy, the Interior, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency.

Some observers noted that when Bill Clinton named off dozens of African Americans to top administration positions, he depleted the ranks of candidates qualified to fill the position of NAACP executive director, a post that Benjamin Hooks was vacating after 16 years in office. Still, the names under consideration were hardly minor league: Chavis Muhammad; minister-activist Jesse Jackson; Jewell Jackson McCabe, founder and president of the Coalition of 100 Black Women; and Earl F. Shinhoster, a regional NAACP official. The appointment process began to look like a high-pressure political campaign. McCabe urged the predominantly male 64-member board to elect the first woman to the post, while Chavis Muhammad sent each board member a 14-minute videotape detailing his personal history, his commitment to the NAACP, and his vision of the organization's future. Most of the attention, however, focused on the controversial Jackson, who withdrew from the race two days before the election, apparently over a change in the NAACP's constitution that he felt would decrease the power of the executive director.

Upon his election in 1993, Chavis Muhammad proclaimed: "Now is the time for healing. Now is the time for unity." However, it was soon discovered that Chavis Muhammad had begun earmarking the organization's funds as hush money for a legal settlement on a sexual harassment case against him and for other controversial initiatives. In a bizarre twist of events, Chavis Muhammad was fired by the NAACP's board of directors in 1994. A District of Columbia Superior Court ruled in 1996 that the organization would not have to pay any part of a $332,400 settlement reached in the case.

In 1995, Chavis Muhammad helped organize the Nation of Islam's Million Man March in which nearly 2 million men, mostly black, traveled to Washington, D.C. seeking spiritual enlightenment and upliftment. Chavis Muhammad later told the New Journal that "the Million Man March helped Black men change their attitude about what was right and what was wrong. And that attitudinal change created a behavioral change. In 1995, the public policy for us was to end Black self-destruction. And to end a prevailing irresponsibility, where brothers were getting sisters pregnant and not taking care of those children."

In seemingly contradictory change of religious conviction, Chavis converted to the Nation of Islam in February 1997 and took the name Muhammad. Chavis Muhammad's desire to join the Nation of Islam and still remain a minister of the United Church of Christ (UCC) was thwarted when the Eastern North Carolina Association of the UCC voted to terminate Chavis Muhammad's ministerial standing in April 1997. He said that God called him to the Nation of Islam, and he hoped to unite Christians and Muslims in building a new nation.

In October 2000, five years after the Million Man March, Chavis Muhammad helped organized the Nation of Islam's Million Family March. He told the New Journal that "the goal of the Million Family March is for us to strengthen our families. And most of the sisters that who are trying to raise children without a man would shout for joy if the father of those children would return and be a father. And if the Million Man March and the Million Family March can help restore the Black man to back to his rightful place in the family, then all praises be to Allah. Who would be against that?"

Several days before the planned march, Chavis Muhammad told USA Today that "the Million Family March will be successful to the extent to which we will see after the march a decrease in divorce and a further decrease in crime and self-destruction. If we see an increase in marriages, if our children get a good education and if we receive a good delivery system of healthcare, these will be the measurements of the success of the mobilization--which is really more than a one-day event."

Associated Organizations

Historical Context

• The Life and Times of Benjamin Chavis Muhammad (1948-)
• At the time of Chavis Muhammad's birth:
• Harry Truman was president of the United States
• The United Nations accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The Marshall Plan was enacted
• The Allies began airlifting supplies to West Berlin when the Soviets closed off their sector of the city
• The transistor was invented
• The times:
• 1950-1953: Korean War
• 1952-present: Reign of Elizabeth II
• Mid-1950s-1970s: Period of Pop Art
• 1957-1975: Vietnam War
• 1967-1970: Nigerian Civil War
• 1970-present: Period of Postmodernism in art
• 1973: Israeli-Arab War
• 1982: Falkland War
• 1983: American invasion of Grenada
• 1991: Persian Gulf War
• Chavis Muhammad's contemporaries:
• W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) American writer and civil rights leader
• Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) American artist
• Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988) Italian race car driver and designer
• Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) French novelist and essayist
• Shirley Chisholm (1924-) American politician
• Idi Amin Dada (1925-) Ugandan president
• Margaret Thatcher (1925-) British prime minister
• Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American civil rights leader
• Brian Friel (1929-) Irish playwright
• Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-) Laguna Pueblo novelist, poet, and short story writer
• Selected world events:
• 1959: South Pacific debuted
• 1963: John F. Kennedy was assassinated
• The Guggenheim Museum held the first major showing of Pop Art
• 1964: Lyndon Johnson enacted Civil Rights Act
• The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed
• 1967: Race riots broke out in Detroit
• 1969: Neil Armstrong walked on the moon
• 1974: Richard Nixon resigned as president of the United States
• 1980: Lech Walesa became the leader of Poland's Solidarity Party
• 1989: The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred

Further Reading

• Audubon, January-February 1992, p. 30.
• Black Enterprise, July 1993, p. 17.
• Boston Globe, April 10, 1993, p. 3; April 18, 1993, p. 85.
• Detroit Free Press, April 14, 1993.
• Ebony, July 1993, pp. 76-80.
• Economist, April 17, 1993, p. 27.
• Emerge, June 1993, pp. 27-28; September 1993, pp. 38-42.
• Jet, April 26, 1993.
• New Journal, September 15, 2000. Available from http://www.newjornalg.com/.
• Newsweek, August 1, 1983, p. 9; June 14, 1993, pp. 68-69; August 29, 1994, p. 27.
• New York Times, April 10, 1993, p. 10; April 11, 1993, p. 20; May 2, 1993.
• People, July 19, 1993, pp. 65-66.
• Time, July 19, 1993, p. 33.
• USA Today, October 12, 2000. Available from http://www.usatoday.com/.
• Wall Street Journal, April 12, 1993, p. B5.
• Washington Post, April 10, 1993, p. A1; April 26, 1993.