When I read headlines announcing that Ben Jealous is stepping down as the head of the NAACP, I was surprised, and saddened.
I first joined the NAACP when I was a child. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles were members. I was raised with elders who taught me the history of the organization. I didn’t learn it in school. It was not part of my grade school curriculum. As a young teenager I joined my local NAACP youth group in NYC, in the chapter headed by William Booth, and participated in sit-ins to combat housing discrimination.
I didn’t always agree with some of the positions they took. As a very militant young adult I was impatient with what I thought at times was a too conservative stance of the organization, especially under Roy Wilkins. Yet, I always thought of the NAACP as a rock. A solid foundation. That it would always be there.
It almost wasn’t. In recent years the NAACP has gone through major internal changes, and faced fiscal challenges. Rescued financially by Myrlie Evers Williams stint as Chairperson of the Board of Directors, the organization began to turn itself around. Slowly, it began to remake itself.
Five years ago, when the Board brought in Benjamin Jealous, they made a decision to select a young person (he was born in 1973) to captain the ship.
Jealous was born in Pacific Grove, California and grew up in Monterey Peninsula, California. He holds a B.A. in political science from Columbia University and a master’s degree in comparative social research from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Jealous went to York School in Monterey for high school.
His mother, Ann Todd Jealous, who is black, is a retired psychotherapist from Baltimore, Maryland who participated in Western High School’s desegregation. She is also the author, with Caroline Haskell, of Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism, released in April 2013. His father, Fred Jealous, who is white, from New England, is the Founder and President of the Breakthrough Men’s Community and participated in Baltimore sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters. As a multiracial couple, it was illegal for them to get married in Maryland until 1967; therefore, they had to marry in Washington before returning to Baltimore. Afterward, Jealous’ father was disowned by his white family from New England
Like many young African-Americans Ben got his feet wet in activism early in life.
Jealous began his career as a community organizer in Harlem in 1991 with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund while working his way through college. In 1993, after being suspended for organizing student protests at Columbia University, he went to work as an investigative reporter for Mississippi’s frequently-firebombed Jackson Advocate newspaper.
Over the past two decades, he has helped organize successful campaigns to abolish the death penalty for children, stop Mississippi’s governor from turning a public historically black university into a prison, and pass federal legislation against prison rape. His journalistic investigations have been credited with helping save the life of a white inmate who was being threatened for helping convict corrupt prison guards, free a black small farmer who was being framed for arson, and spur official investigations into law enforcement corruption.
A Rhodes Scholar, he is a graduate of Columbia and Oxford University, the past president of the Rosenberg Foundation and served as the founding director of Amnesty International’s US Human Rights Program. While at Amnesty, he authored the widely-cited report: Threat and Humiliation–Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States. Jealous has led the NAACP to advocate against “stop-and-frisk” police tactics and stand-your-ground laws following the death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. He has also fought to abolish the death penalty at the state level, in Maryland, New Mexico, Illinois and Connecticut.
The Baltimore Sun had this excellent editorial:
Our view: Retiring President Benjamin Jealous transformed the nation’s oldest civil rights group by refocusing it on contemporary challenges
When Benjamin Jealous, at 35, became the youngest person ever to lead the NAACP in 2008, he took over an institution with a venerable name but whose greatest triumphs appeared to lie in the past. Mr. Jealous, who announced last week that he will step down from his post as president of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in January, quickly set about changing that, working to attract a younger generation of members with a more expansive vision of civil rights that addresses contemporary concerns. As a result, the NAACP he leaves behind is today a far larger, stronger and more effective advocate for social justice than the group he inherited just five years ago.
Mr. Jealous was the first leader of a major traditional civil rights organization to openly advocate not only for equal treatment of gay people in housing and employment but also for their right to serve openly in the nation’s military and to marry. Moreover, he did so at a time when many among the NAACP’s traditionally church-going membership opposed equating African-Americans’ struggle for equal justice with the gay rights movement. But Mr. Jealous recognized that no one’s rights were safe unless the rights of all were secure. Acting on that principle, he courageously allied his group with gay rights organizations and stood on the front lines of their struggle. When critics charged he had strayed from the NAACP’s core mission, he had a ready answer: There are lots of gay people who are also black, and they deserve our support too.
It was a principle he also applied to immigration and the right of people of color from all over the world to live and work in the U.S. free from racial profiling and police harassment. Again, Mr. Jealous insisted on breaking down the cultural barriers that separated African-Americans’ quest for equal rights from the struggles of Hispanics and even from black immigrants from places like Haiti, Jamaica and Nigeria.
The NAACP board is now setting up a search committee. There is talk that they may be looking for a woman to head the organization for the first time. Frankly, I don’t care about what gender they choose. It needs to be someone who will continue what Jealous has done in making the NAACP of today relevant, and who will move it forward in today’s society, dealing with the multiplicity of challenges we face, in a political climate poisoned by a right wing SCOTUS majority and a racist Republican backlash against the nation’s first black President.
So thank you Ben Jealous, for not only what you have achieved, but also for what I know you will go on to achieve in the future.
(Just a reminder, Jealous was a keynote speaker at Netroots Nation in 2012)
Cross-posted from Black Kos
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