Rev. Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. is an African American Civil Rights Movement veteran leader and icon. He is an author, chemist, United Church of Christ ordained minister, and PBS TV Executive Producer of The Chavis Chronicles. He is currently President and CEO of the National Newspaper Publishers Association and Professor of Divinity and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University (former inaugural Environmental Justice Fellow at Duke). He also chairs the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, Thurgood Marshall Center Trust, We Are Digital, and the Energy Action Alliance. As a member of the Wilmington Ten, he spent the majority of the 1970s incarcerated as a modern-day political prisoner for a crime for which he was ultimately pardoned. Known as the Godfather of the Environmental Justice Movement, in 1982 Dr. Chavis was the first person to coin the term “environmental racism” during civil rights protests of racial and environmental injustice in Warren County, North Carolina. In 1987, Chavis co-authored the landmark study Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, and in 1993, Dr. Chavis was the youngest person to be elected as Executive Director and CEO of the NAACP. He worked side by side with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as Youth Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 2022, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris awarded Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award for national Civil Rights leadership. Dr. Chavis has earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and Howard University.