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NAACP Introduces Youngest Leader

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The Associated Press

Published: May 18, 2008

BALTIMORE - The NAACP chose 35-year-old activist and former news executive Ben Jealous as its president Saturday, making him the youngest leader in the 99-year history of the nation's largest civil rights organization.

The 64-member board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People met for eight hours before selecting Jealous in the early morning.

He was formally introduced Saturday afternoon and will take over as president in September.

In selecting Jealous, the NAACP broke with its tradition of picking politicians and ministers to lead, as it did three years ago with its selection of telecommunications executive Bruce Gordon.

Jealous is a former news executive, having served as executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, which encompasses about 200 black newspapers, and as managing editor of the Jackson Advocate, a black newspaper in Mississippi.

"Ben Jealous has spent his professional life working for and raising money for the very social justice concerns for which the NAACP advocates," NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said in a statement.

Jealous provides the organization with a young but connected chief familiar with black leadership and social justice issues.

He takes the helm as the NAACP's 17th president just months before the organization's centennial anniversary and as the group looks to boost its coffers.

"There are a small number of groups to whom all black people in this country owe a debt of gratitude, and the NAACP is one of them," Jealous said. "There is work that is undone. ... The need continues and our children continue to be at great risk in this country."

Jealous succeeds Gordon, who resigned abruptly in March 2007. Gordon left after 19 months, citing clashes with board members over management style and the NAACP's mission as his reasons for leaving.

"Like all black people in this country, I am deeply grateful for what the NAACP has accomplished in the 20th century, and I want to make sure it's as strong and as powerful in the 21st century," Jealous said. "If I thought that I could help rebuild, if I thought that I could help bring in more funds and give direction to the national staff and increase morale, I needed to take it very seriously, and that's what I've done."

Despite his own successes, Jealous said blacks in America still have a hard row to hoe, and that the gains of recent decades have created a false sense of progress.

"Those of us who are 45 and younger were told, 'The struggle has been won. Go out and flourish. Don't worry about the movement,'" he said.

Among his plans for the group are strengthening its online presence to connect with activists, mobilize public opinion and build a database for tracking racial discrimination and hate crimes; ensuring high voter turnout among blacks in the November election; pushing an aggressive civil rights agenda, regardless of the makeup of the Congress or White House; and retooling the national office to make it more effective at helping local branches effect change in their communities.

Jealous said he can attract 25- to 50-year-olds - the missing demographic among most chapters - back to the organization.

PROFILE

Education: Columbia University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar

NAACP ties: He began his professional life in 1991 with the NAACP, where he worked as a community organizer with the Legal Defense Fund on issues of health care access in Harlem. His family boasts five generations of NAACP membership.

Career: Managing editor of the Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest black newspaper, mid-1990s; executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, 1999-2002; directed Amnesty International's U.S. Human Rights Program, where he successfully lobbied for federal legislation against prison rape, public disapproval of racial profiling after Sept. 11, and exposure of widespread sentencing of children to life in prison without the possibility of parole, 2002-2005; president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private institution that supports civil and human rights advocacy, 2005-present.

Source: The Associated Press

Information from The Washington Post was used in this report.

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