Two days after his 36th birthday, the new president and chief executive officer of the NAACP found himself a part of history.
Surrounded by members of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and seminal figures in the fight for civil rights, like Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, Benjamin Todd Jealous waited on the dais on the steps of the U.S. Capitol for the swearing in of America’s first African-American president.
“Sitting there on steps built by slaves, with the descendants of slaves, watching the first black president of the United States being inaugurated,” the Californian said recalling the moment in an interview with his home town paper, “it was an incredible view of an incredible historical event.”
Jealous said he thought of the significance of the day for people like his grandmother, Mamie Todd, a civil rights activist and third generation member of the NAACP. He pondered the meaning of the Obama presidency for the younger generation, a group that came out early and enthusiastically in support of the youthful looking “candidate with the funny name” for president of the United States.
As it was with the candidacy of Barack Obama, the younger generation could make a crucial difference to the future of the oldest civil rights organization, Jealous believes.
In selecting Jealous, the 64-member board voted 34-21 to bring in their youngest president ever and broke with a tradition of picking ministers and political figures to lead it. As the group’s 17th president, Jealous’ mandate is to attract and shore up the coveted younger generation as members.
The Youth & College Division represents about 24,000 young people in youth councils, high schools and on college campuses around the nation and is the fastest growing portion of the Association’s membership, according to the organization’s statistics. General membership increased 30 percent in 2008 compared to 2007.
Julian Bond, the NAACP’s chairman for the past ten years believes Jealous is the right person to keep the membership on an upward trajectory.
“More than any recent president, Ben Jealous has spent his entire life preoccupied with civil rights,” Bond said. “Despite his youth he has had a variety of experiences that fit us exactly. He’ll have to raise money like nobody’s business, raise the organization’s visibility, raise membership and keep us on the cutting edge in civil rights.”
Tall and photogenic Jealous has an interracial background almost similar to President Obama. His mother, Ann Jealous who lives in Pacific Grove, Ca, grew up in Baltimore’s McCullough homes and is black. His father, Fred Jealous is white.
Jealous’ activism began at age 14 in a voter registration drive and continued through college. Born in Carmel, he went to school in Monterey County. He spent a semester of high school in Washington, D.C. as a congressional page for Leon Panetta and served as an intern for Representative Sam Farr.
As an undergraduate at Columbia University, Jealous honed his leadership skills as a community organizer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in nearby Harlem and on the Ivy League campus. He led school-wide protests for the rights of the homeless and headed a successful campaign to save financial programs for those needing support when other universities were eliminating them.
His on-campus protests ultimately led to the student leader’s academic suspension. He spent that break in Jackson, Mississippi, where he continued working as a field organizer for the NAACP helping to lead a campaign that prevented the state from closing two of its three public historically black universities, and converting one of them into a prison.
He took a job as a reporter at the Jackson Advocate, an African American newspaper based in the state’s capital. The paper was frequently firebombed and according to accounts, Jealous’ reporting was credited with exposing corruption among high-ranking officials at the storied maximum security state prison in Parchman. His work at the Advocate eventually lead to his promotion to managing editor.
Jealous returned to Columbia and completed the unfinished business of his undergraduate degree. He followed that up with a master’s in social policy from Oxford University, where he attended on a Rhodes scholarship. He worked as Director of the US Domestic Human Rights Program of Amnesty International in Washington, D.C. and was Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. He also was program director for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Last year, Jealous was actively involved in one of the NAACP’s core interests: voter registration. He leveraged the technological tools that define his generation. During three weeks in Mississippi, Jealous said he and a voter registration team helped sign up 25,000 people online at an average cost of 76 cents per registered voter. They registered another 100,000 people on the street at a cost of $7 per person. “The most active state online was Mississippi,” he said trumpeting the potential of the web.
Today, the NAACP finds that technology is redefining its membership roles, said Richard McIntire, the organization’s national spokesperson. “We are using more on-line tools to build capacity and membership.” He explained that the membership breaks down into tradition and virtual. About 300,000 people fit the traditional on the ground meeting attendees. Then there are more than 330,000 young cyber members who sign up online for petitions and other call-to-action activities. “They don’t have the traditional branch affiliations,” McIntire said. “The college division utilizes Face Book, My Space and Youtube to communicate. We’ve been there for over two years.”
As Jealous considers the possibilities of the organization he rejects any suggestion that the NAACP is pass. “What makes the NAACP different historically from any other group is our track record of consistently transforming this country for the better not just for black people but for all people,” he said.
“We are good at converting big bold dreams into big victories. In 1909 in a meeting in a New York City apartment, a few men decided that lynching had to be eradicated.”
He pointed out that the NAACP systematically defeated lynch mobs first, then desegregated the military, ended Jim Crow, desegregated institutions and politics. “Black candidates are winning in Alabama,” he said, noting the impossibility of that accomplishment only ten years ago.
“We’ve had a focused agenda for more than five decades of enforcing a social contract, enforcing the 14th amendment,” he said of the venerable organization’s mission. “We are in a massive rebuilding phase to build the technology and personnel.”
Jealous notes that an intrepid NAACP has had to continue expanding the social contract which is a fundamentally more ambitious agenda. “Once, it was every child should go to the same school, he said. Now it is every child should go to a good school.” He insisted “We will use technology to do all of the above even better.”
Turning back to the question of what shook him out of a comfortable life in San Francisco and into the driver’s seat of an organization with a lot of work to do, Jealous, the father, settles his thoughts on his three-year-old daughter, Morgan. “I thought about her mathematically limited prospects for suitors,” he said.
“My generation was told all the battles were won and we will be rewarded for our hard work. But by the time we grew up we had emerged right into another crisis, growing up just in time to become the most incarcerated people.” What’s more, he said “The drug economy and deaths from the late 1980’s to now show that the leading cause of death among young black men is homicide.”
If he dares to pay no attention to addressing the problems impacting black men, he says, by the time Morgan is of age “there simply will be no one for her to marry.”
Jealous File
Wife: Lia Epperson Jealous, a civil rights attorney who teaches law.
Greatest Joy: Daughter, Morgan Epperson Jealous, age 3
Heart’s Desire: For his daughter to grow up fearless.
Favorite childhood toy: Tennis ball. Lived across the street from public tennis court and we kids used that ball for everything. Used it for street hockey, pickup street soccer, pickup basketball.
Heroes: His parents, maternal grandparents and great grandfather Peter Gordon who was one of two dozen black co-signers in 1867 of the Virginia Constitution.
Most outstanding worst habit: I don’t sleep.
Most outstanding best habit: I listen.
Favorite reading material: The writings of KalilGibran. The Book of Matthew in the Bible.
Reading Now: A lot of magazines. No time for books. Economist, Nation, Black Enterprise, Harpers – and one book, Einstein’s Dreams.
