The NAACP picked the youngest president in its history Saturday ? Benjamin T. Jealous, a 35-year-old former newspaper editor and human rights activist.
The governing board of the Baltimore-based NAACP settled on Jealous as its 17th leader early Saturday morning after eight hours of contentious, closed-door debate.
Jealous, a California native and graduate of Columbia and Oxford universities, said he plans to make the NAACP more influential on the local level and hopes to get minorities more involved in politics to bring about change.
“I?ve been preparing for this responsibility since I was 14 years old and held my first voter-registration drive,” he said.
“I think that it’s a real affirmation that this organization is willing to invest in the future, to invest in the ideas and the leadership of the generation that is currently raising black children in this country.”
Julian Bond, NAACP chairman, called Jealous an ideal leader for the half-million-member civil rights group.
“This is a great day for the NAACP on the announcement of a new leader for NAACP,” Bond said. “His name is Benjamin Jealous. He’s a Rhodes Scholar, a man of enormous achievement at a very young age.”
The NAACP board approved Jealous by a 34-21 vote after the late-night deliberations and interviews.
Since 2005, Jealous has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, which supports civil and human rights advocacy for families and recent immigrants.
Before that, he led Amnesty International?s U.S. Human Rights Program. There, he lobbied for federal legislation against prison rape, condemned post-Sept. 11 racial profiling after Sept. 11, and exposed widespread sentencing of teens to life in prison without parole.
In the 1990s, Jealous served as managing editor of the Jackson Advocate, Mississippi‘s oldest black newspaper. He had come to the state as a field organizer of a campaign to stop a plan to close two of its three public historically black universities — and convert one of them into a prison.
The Advocate exposed corruption at a state prison in Parchman and helped acquit a small farmer who had been wrongfully accused of arson, the NAACP said.
From 1999 to 2002, Jealous led the country’s largest group of black community newspapers, the National Newspaper Publishers Association.
He began his career as an organizer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, focusing on healthcare access.
Jealous, who spent his summers as a child with cousins in Baltimore, assumes a challenging role as head of an organization that some say is losing standing.
He acknowledged as much in remarks after his selection, saying, “This is a big day. Across the country, there are people in my generation who have checked out of this organization, and this is my day to say it is time to check back in.”
The NAACP president?s position has been vacant for more than a year. Bruce Gordon, a former Verizon executive, resigned in Mach 2007 after less than two years, citing a strained relationship with what he called an overbearing board.
