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Lifelong political activist Benjamin Chavis Muhammad (born 1948) overcame racial injustice and wrongful imprisonment to become a vocal leader in the civil rights movement. The former United Church of Christ minister and NAACP executive director converted to the Nation of Islam in February 1997.
The first political act of Benjamin Chavis Muhammad came when he was a wide-eyed 13-year-old. On his way home from school each day, Chavis Muhammad would pass a whites-only library in Oxford, North Carolina. One day, tired of tattered hand-me-downs and desirous of a book with two intact covers on it, he boldly walked into the library. The librarians told him to leave, but he questioned that demand. "He asked why," a childhood friend told the New York Times. "A lot of us when we were told to go away . . . would just do so, but Ben would always challenge, always ask why." The librarians called his parents, but the incident, like the spunkiness of the boy at its center, could not be calmed, and tempers flared.
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