Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. (born January 22, 1948) in Oxford, North Carolina is an African-American civil rights leader and icon, author, journalist, organic chemist, environmentalist, global entrepreneur, and currently President and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. 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 NC, 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 NC 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, and he became a Vice President of the National Council of Churches in 1988 in New York City. In 1993, the national board of directors of the NAACP elected Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr as the Executive Director and CEO of America's oldest civil rights organization. Chavis later served in 1995 as the National Director of the Million Man March, and the Founder and CEO of the National African American Leadership Summit (NAALS). Since 2001, Chavis has been CEO and Co-Chairman of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, in New York City which he co-founded with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. On June 24, 2014, Chavis became the president and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an African-American organization which focuses on supporting and advocating for publishers of the nation's more than 230 black newspapers. Early life Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. was born and grew up in Oxford, North Carolina. In 1960 at the age of twelve, Chavis became the first African American to be issued a library card at the segregated public library. He graduated from Mary Potter High School in 1965 and entered St. Augustine College in Raleigh as a freshman. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (1969). Chavis worked in the civil rights movement, leading a march in 1970 to the state capital in protest after three white men were acquitted of killing Henry D. Marrow in Oxford. He was a leader of the Wilmington