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Chavis Legacy: 250 Years of Freedom Movement Leadership and Activism

The Chavis family has been deeply rooted in the “freedom movement” in Granville County, North Carolina for over 250 years as landowners, farmers, educators, theologians, physicians, and activists. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr is the great, great, great-grandson of the Reverend John Chavis (1763-1838), the first Black American to attend Princeton University, and the first Black American to be ordained as a Presbyterian minister in the United States in 1799. In his youth in the early 1960s, Chavis was the North Carolina statewide youth coordinator and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) assistant to Martin Luther King Jr., who inspired him to work and to become a Christian minister in the civil rights movement across the United States, and to later to champion African liberation in Angola, Namibia, South Africa and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Chavis became an active supporter and associate of the African National Congress (ANC) led by Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela. Chavis first attended Saint Augustine University (HBCU) in Raleigh, NC in 1965 and 1966 majoring in chemistry. He transferred to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1967 and graduated with a BA in Chemistry in 1970. While in Charlotte, Chavis continued to work as a college student for SCLC and as a labor organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).