Benjamin Jealous: A New Generation of NAACP Leadership

Marian Wright Edelman, Huffington Post

- In September, with his selection as the new president and CEO of the NAACP, Ben Jealous became, at 35, the youngest president in the organization’s history. He represents a new generation of Black leadership?one of many Black adults and youths who grew up benefitting from the increased access to education and opportunity opened up by the Civil Rights Movement, which was spearheaded by the NAACP. His challenge is to honor that legacy by building the next phase of the movement of those who struggled before him by focusing on those still in need.

Jealous comes from a family committed to social justice whose members have belonged to the NAACP for five generations. During the 1950s his Black mother was one of the first students to desegregate her Baltimore high school, and his White father participated in sit-ins and other civil rights protests. Jealous himself has been a political activist since he organized a voter registration drive at age 14. As a college student at Columbia University, he worked for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) in Harlem as a community organizer. His wife, law professor Lia Epperson, is a former LDF litigator and director of its education law and policy group. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in political science from Columbia, Jealous won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University where he received a master’s degree in comparative social research.

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