- Posted in All University
- Category: Campus News
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, PA – Dr. Benjamin Chavis Jr., co-founder, president and CEO of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), will speak at Lincoln University on Thursday, February 18, at 11 a.m. in the Ware Center Theater, on the University’s main campus in southern Chester County.
Dr. Chavis’ speech will be a testimony of the pivotal event that occurred in Oxford, NC, which spawned the making of the Civil Rights focused movie, Blood Done Sign My Name (2010). Afterward, there will be a screening of the movie.
Blood Done Sign My Name is a candid account of a shocking episode in the last days of Jim Crow North Carolina—an event that took place nearly a decade after the Civil Rights Movement was supposed to have purged the South of the evils of segregation and racial violence. The film chronicles the race-related murder of Henry “Dickie” Marrow, cousin of Benjamin Chavis Jr., and its aftermath from multiple perspectives.
The movie is based on the acclaimed book of the same name and memoirs by prize-winning author and scholar Timothy Tyson. It stars Rick Schroder of the hit television series, NYPD Blue, and Nate Parker from the movie The Great Debaters. Tyson, now a visiting professor at Duke University, was 10 at the time of Marrow’s murder, the son of a progressive white Methodist minister who tried to bring about change in his congregation.
The film also depicts the uprising that caused Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., now 62, to emerge as a leader in the Black community. Then a young high school teacher and budding civil rights organizer, Chavis began his career in 1963, as a statewide youth coordinator in North Carolina for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1970, Chavis was appointed as the southern regional program director of the 1.7 million-member United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ). He was named the executive director and CEO of the UCC-CRJ in 1985. In 1988, Dr. Chavis was elected vice president of the National Council of Churches of the USA. From 1985 to 1993, Dr. Chavis wrote and produced the national syndicated newspaper column and radio program, “Civil Rights Journal.”
In 1993 and 1994, Dr. Chavis served as the executive director and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was the national director and organizer of the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, DC. From 1995 to 1997, Chavis was the executive director and CEO of the National African American Leadership Summit (NAALS). His social experience and leadership expertise inspired him to co-found the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network with Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons. Last year, Dr. Chavis joined with Ezell Brown to establish the Education Online Services Corporation.
This event is in honor of Black History Month and is free and open to the public.