Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. is an activist, author, journalist, and the current president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. In 1993, the national board of directors of the NAACP elected Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. as the executive director and CEO of America’s oldest civil rights organization. In his youth, Chavis was a youth coordinator and SCLC assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. At the age of 23, he rose to prominence in 1971 as the leader of the Wilmington Ten in North Carolina, civil rights activists who were unjustly convicted of committing arson.