Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. International College of Ministers & Laity at Morehouse College

Please join everyone at the National Newspaper Publishers Association in congratulating our president and CEO, Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., who has been inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. International College of Ministers and Laity at Morehouse College. The ceremony was held on April 11, during the twenty-fourth-anniversary celebration of the Gandhi-King-Ikeda-Mandela (GKIM) Institute for Cosmopolitan Virtue-Ethics and Reconciliation. This program focuses on meditation, conflict transformation, and peace.

“We forge a mission to link the “love-olutions” of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Daisaku Ikeda, and Nelson Mandela so that the four may come together at this hour to transform the old world into a new WorldHouse of moral citizenship, tolerance, respect for difference, and diversity—maturity grounded in spiritual oneness.” notes the program honoring the event. “We must be the change we wish to see.”

The annual celebration is a tradition at Morehouse that has significance far beyond the campus borders. “Historically Black churches and historically Black colleges, with chapels, appeared from the mind of Black and White northern and southern freedom loving abolitionists, as the strongest way to fight racial oppression, promote Reconstruction, and champion the Black social gospel,” writes Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., 33˚Ph.D., D.D., D.H., D.R.S., D.H.C., MULT., Founding Dean of the Chapel, Professor of Religion, College Archivist and Curator Founder, Gandhi-King-Ikeda-Mandela Institute for Cosmopolitan Ethics and Reconciliation. “This tradition affirmed the dignity, sacred personhood, creativity, and moral agency of African Americans and launched a new liberal liberationist abolitionism with an advanced role for the Black church, fresh from the freedom spaces of Brush and Hush Harbors, and the celebratory sounds, symbols, and traditions of West Africa, in response to the tragedy of American legal slavery.”

Charge to the 2024 CML Inductees

I am pleased today to induct you into the Morehouse College Black Social Gospel tradition – founded in 1867 by William Jefferson White, greatly enhanced by William Edward Burghardt DuBois, John Hope,

Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Benjamin Elijah Mays, Howard Washington Thurman, and widely acclaimed during the nonviolent prophetic Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

As members of the Martin Luther King Jr. Board of Preachers, Board of Sponsors, and Collegium of Scholars, you join a pantheon of adaptive leaders whose virtue ethical, spiritual, and moral example has helped change the world. Among them: Henry Lyman Morehouse, Adam Daniel Williams, Martin Luther King Sr., Ralph David Abernathy Sr., Floyd McKissick, Samuel Woodrow Williams, Thomas Kilgore Jr., James Madison Nabritt, and Thurgood Marshall.

I charge you, therefore, to follow in their footsteps – and even to do greater things – as affirmative, appreciative, coherently critical and engaged role models for this generation of students, always remembering that our vision is the creation of an inclusive, global, dignitarian society in which the full development of each individual’s potential is realized.

Further, I charge you to be faithful servant scholar leaders, guarantors of continuity, celebrators of change, negotiators of structure, facilitators of meaning, practitioners of cosmopolitan ethics, and co-creators of the Beloved Economic Political Cosmic WorldHouse Community, to the end that we will right the age-old wrongs that continue to haunt the American people and others around the world.

Finally, I charge you to use your time, talent, tender and technology to help usher in an age of diversity maturity, peace, and nonviolence for the children of the world, to raise another generation of ethically inspired leaders committed to building a radically inclusive humanity.

In token of our hope and confidence in you, we present these citations, which list 49 cosmopolitan virtue ethical options by which Martin Luther King Jr. and many Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Scientists and Secular Humanists live their lives and transform society.

Testifying to this investiture, and in witness whereof under the seals of the College and the Chapel, the signatures of duly authorized officers are hereunto affixed, this 11th day of April 2024, Per Dominum Nostrum Jesum Christum.