NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization, has broken with tradition and chosen Benjamin Jealous, a young, radical organizer as its new president. A former-teenage protest organizer and later Rhodes scholar, Jealous would be the youngest leader of the organization in its 99-year history, and a leader whose track record very much parallels Barack Obama's. The rest over the fold.
News has just broken that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP departed tradition Friday night when it chose Benjamin Jealous, 35, as its new president. Jealous is currently executive director of the Rosenberg Charitable Foundation in California and would be NAACP's youngest leader.
Born and raised in California of a black mother and white father, Jealous organized a high school voter registration drive in San Francisco in 1987 to help the presidential bid of Jesse Jackson. He was 14 year old. Due to his activism, he became the youngest precinct captain in California during the 1988 Presidential primaries.
Jealous then studied at Columbia during which time he interned at the New York national office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., working on healthcare issues. He also worked with the Harlem Restoration Youth Project while at Columbia.
After college, Jealous, then 19, joined the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in Washington in 1993, where he coordinated the union's student campaign to help save historically black public colleges. He worked on a weekly stipend of $85.
Soon the A.F.L.-C.I.O. campaign took him to Mississipi where he eventually left the job to become an investigative journalist with Mississippi's radical Jackson Advocate, fondly known as the most firebombed newspaper house in the nation. Jealous's reports for the Advocate are credited for sparking several official investigations into the Mississippi prison service as well as the acquital of an innocent farmer who was falsely charged with arson. Jealous eventually rose to become the youngest editor of the Jackson Advocate.
After studying as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford for his master's degree, Benjamin Jealous returned to Washington as the Program Director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, building on his experience with the prison system in Mississippi. From 1999 to 2002 he was the Executive Director of NNPA, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a federation of 200 African-American community newspapers.
In 2002 the peripatetic Jealous joined Amnesty International, USA, as Director of its Domestic Human Rights Program. At the time, Amnesty International USA's Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy Gerald LeMelle described Jealous as "a dedicated social justice activist who brings a wealth of experience".
In 2005 Benjamin Jealous returned to California as Director of the Rosenberg Foundation. Founded in 1935, the Rosenberg Foundation describes its chief objective as achieving "significant and lasting improvements in the lives of the people of California." In the past the Foundation has been involved in programs to
improve the lives of underprivileged and incarcerated children; to secure equal access to quality education; to integrate people of color and immigrants into civic institutions and the state's economy; and to increase the economic health of working families.
It has championed child support reform, legalizing and aiding immigrant families, and educational programs for minority and immigrant children, among many other causes. Under Mr. Jealous, the Rosenberg has also funded non-profit organizations whose programs focus on "economic, social or civic progress".
Jealous was elected by a vote of 34-21 by the national board of the NAACP and is the first leader of the organization who is not a politician or gospel minister. It should me mentioned that two preachers were initially favored for the position, and Jealous's election was not without controversy. Some have described it as shocking since the more fiery preachers were expected to be selected.
However, with his background in community organizing, investigative journalism, and life-long social advocacy, Jealous is expected to herald an era of broad change that will straighten the bealeaguered organization and expand its youth base as well as give it renewed focus and relevance to the present. His leadership will also break the organization's traditional umbilical tie to the black church, hopefully for good.
In 2002, Benjamin Jealous wedded Lia Epperson, the woman who took over his job at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. a decade earlier. Attorney Epperson is currently Assistant Professor of constitutional law at Santa Clara University and a staunch Obama supporter and donor.
A younger Benjamin "Todd" Jealous on Charlie Rose in 1997