Benjamin Jealous

Childhood and education

Benjamin Jealous was born in 1973 in Pacific Grove, California and grew up on the Monterey Peninsula. His mother, Ann (Todd) Jealous, is black. She worked as a psychotherapist and had grown up in Baltimore, Maryland. She had participated there in the desegregation of Western High School. She is the author, with Caroline Haskell, of Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism (2013). His father, Fred Jealous, is white and from New England. He founded the Breakthrough Men's Community and participated in Baltimore sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters. Jealous' parents met in Baltimore. As an interracial couple, they were prohibited by state law from marrying in Maryland before 1967. They married in Washington, DC and returned to live in Baltimore for a time before moving to California in the early 1970s. As a child, Jealous was sent to Baltimore to spend his summers with his maternal grandparents, who lived in the Ashburton neighborhood.

Jealous holds a B.A. in political science from Columbia University. He was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a master's degree in comparative social research from the University of Oxford.

Early activism

At Columbia University, Jealous began working as an organizer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. As a student, he protested the university's plan to turn the site of Malcolm X's assassination into a research facility and was suspended. During his suspension, Jealous traveled through the South. During this time Mississippi's three black colleges were slated to be closed because of financial difficulties. Jealous organized with the local NAACP chapter to keep them fully funded and maintain their operations.

While in Mississippi, Jealous began working as a reporter for Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest historically black newspaper, under the tutelage of publisher Charles Tisdale. He eventually became its managing editor. His reporting was credited with exposing corruption among high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman. In addition, he helped acquit a small farmer who had been wrongfully accused of arson. Jealous returned to Columbia in 1997, where he applied for and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

After completing his degree at Oxford and returning to the US, Jealous worked as Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers. During his term, he relocated the organization's editorial office to Howard University in Washington, DC. He set up an online syndicated news service that shared content with all of the organization's member papers.

After the NNPA, he served as director of the US Human Rights Program at Amnesty International. He focused on issues such as promoting federal legislation against prison rape, racial profiling, and the sentencing of persons to life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) who are convicted for acts committed as children. (In 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled that such sentencing was unconstitutional, and ordered its ruling to be applied to people already in prison.) Jealous is the lead author of the 2004 report "Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States."

Jealous accepted a position as President of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private foundation located in San Francisco, CA.

NAACP

Jealous was elected in 2008 as President and CEO of the NAACP; at age 35, he was the youngest person to serve in that position. He served through 2012. During his term, Jealous initiated national programs on criminal justice, health, environmental justice and voting rights, expanded existing programs and opened the NAACP Financial Freedom Center to provide financial education and banking resources.

During his tenure, the NAACP helped register 374,553 voters and mobilize 1.2 million new voters to turn out at the polls for the 2012 presidential election. It supported abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut and Maryland, endorsed marriage equality, and fought laws it believed were intended for voter suppression in states across the country.

During Jealous' tenure, the number of NAACP's online activists increased from 175,000 to more than 675,000; its donors increased from 16,000 individuals to more than 132,000; and the number of total NAACP activists was 1.7 million.

Coalition building

Jealous led the NAACP to work closely with other civil rights, labor and environmental groups. In 2010 the NAACP was one of the conveners of the One Nation Working Together Rally, which Jealous referred to as "an antidote" to the Tea Party. In June 2012, the NAACP led several thousand protesters from different groups to march down New York City's Fifth Avenue in protest of the NYPD's policy of stop-and-frisk policing. In 2012 Jealous formed the Democracy Initiative along with other progressive leaders, to build a national campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, supporting voting rights, and reforming broken Senate rules. Finally, in 2013 Jealous gave the keynote address at the A10 Rally for Citizenship, a major rally for immigration reform at the US Capitol.

Jealous broadened the NAACP's alliances. In 2011 he spoke at the National Press Club with conservatives including Grover Norquist; David Keene, former American Conservative Union President; and Republican representative Newt Gingrich. They endorsed the NAACP's report, Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate. about the high rate of incarceration in the US and its cost to society on multiple levels. In Texas later that year, the NAACP worked with leaders of the Tea Party to pass a dozen criminal justice reform measures, leading to the first scheduled prison closure in state history. Similarly, in 2013, the NAACP worked closely with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to pass bipartisan voting rights reform that gave former offenders the chance to vote after they served the terms of their sentence.

Upon announcing his resignation in 2013, Jealous was praised by activists for his coalition-building efforts.

Jealous was noted for reviving and building the resources of the NAACP. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, he was:

...credited with infusing the organization, once seen as graying and vulnerable, with energy, modernity… On his watch over the past five years, the group doubled its budget and national staff, thanks to sometimes explosive growth in fundraising. It shook off years of scandal and torpor, racked up victories in city halls and statehouses, and registered hundreds of thousands of voters. Now, as Mr. Jealous, 40, this week announces his resignation… he leaves a road map for reinvigorating nonprofit advocacy.

Awards and honors

Jealous has earned the following awards and honors for his activism: