Chavis, Benjamin Franklin (1948– )

US civil-rights campaigner. As executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1993, he succeeded in putting the NAACP more in touch with the concerns of the black community, recruiting 160,000 new members, although he was criticized by conservative blacks for his friendly relations with Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam.

Chavis was a direct descendant of John Chavis (1763–1838), a former slave who graduated from Princeton University. He was sentenced to 34 years in prison in 1972 as leader of the Wilmington Ten, convicted of conspiracy and arson. While in prison he gained a master of divinity degree and taught a seminar on black church studies at Duke University, North Carolina. The convictions were overturned in 1980. He became executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice and commissioned a study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (1987), which showed that a large number of hazardous-waste dumps were in black neighbourhoods.