NAME The Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis Muhammad (Dr. Ben)
PROFESSION President & CEO, The Hip-Hop Summit Action Network
HOME BASE New York City
AGE 57
From working under the auspices of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to hand-in-hand with hip-hop giants Russell Simmons and Damon Dash, Muhammad’s championing of racial equality began at Duke Divinity School. The seasoned Civil Rights veteran—he became involved in the movement at age 12—graduated with a Masters of Divinity in 1980 but not without his own personal struggle. Imprisoned for organizing a boycott of segregated schools in Wilmington, N.C., at the time, Muhammad spent countless nights and weekends in a Hillsborough jail. Each morning prison employees would drop him off in front of the Duke Chapel, returning to pick him up in the early evening. Because of strict lights-out policies in the facility, Muhammad said he often studied in the prison bathrooms.
“One of the requirements for divinity school is that you have to take Greek,” he says. “[The bathroom] was a very filthy, decadent place to try to learn, especially to learn Greek. But I had to study.”
When he wasn’t studying, Muhammad sat under the dingy men’s room lights writing letters to South African apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, also imprisoned at the time. The two remain close.
After graduating magna cum laude (his conviction in the Wilmington case was overturned), Muhammad went on to become the youngest executive director of the NAACP and later the national director of the Million Man March. All of his work for racial justice, he says, was catalyzed by his experience as an incarcerated Duke student.
“Unjust imprisonment helped to strengthen my commitment to be a freedom fighter,” he says. “I was later vice president of the National Council of Churches, in which capacity I did a lot of work in Africa. My whole worldview expanded as a result of my Duke career.”
A convert to Islam in 1997, he also co-founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network with close friend and colleague Simmons, the mastermind behind Def Jam. Under the moniker “Dr. Ben,” he has also recorded self-termed “sermonettes” with various hip-hop and rap artists. And at the time of his interview with TV, Muhammad and his association were preparing for the Live 8 concerts to fund the eradication of poverty and HIV-AIDS in Africa.
“We have not totally reached any utopia by any means. There is still too much injustice,” Muhammad says about his future as an activist. “On the other hand, we’ve made tremendous progress. I see young people as more tolerant, and to me that is a very positive sign.”
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