The Trials of Benjamin Jealous (Page 2)

KAREN CALDICOTT

Jealous grew up in Monterey, California, but spent a lot of time in Baltimore, where his mother was raised. His household was a bubbling caldron of politics, debate and history. Jealous's maternal grandmother would recount for him oral histories of his family's struggles under slavery and Jim Crow. Robert Watts, Baltimore's pioneering civil rights jurist, was a family friend. From the time Jealous was 4, Watts would greet him by asking, "Son, what are you prepared to argue about?"

Jealous lodged his first protests in first grade, over the lack of books about black history in the school library. "I never liked fairy tales. I always liked history," he recalls. "I read a lot of books themed around the bicentennial. I read all the books on my dad's family. And then I asked, 'Do you have any on my mom's family? Not the railroad slave or the peanut butter guy.' The librarian was stumped."

When Jealous was 13, he attended the birthday party of the son of McGeorge Bundy, former national security adviser to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. "My first phrase was 'What were you thinking when you planned the Bay of Pigs invasion?'" recalls Jealous. "He said, 'You know, son, I'd rather not talk about that right now...'"

By the time Jealous was 16, he was registering voters for the NAACP. At Columbia, where Jealous went to college, he continued in the family tradition but with a kind of privileged bent that's rarely seen in black activists. When Jealous was 18, he was stopped on Columbia's campus by an FBI officer who mistook him for an Iraqi student. (Jealous had spent the previous week protesting the Gulf War.)

"I went off on him about why I looked the way I looked," says Jealous, referring to his ancestry. "That was the moment where I really realized I had ownership in this country. And for him to suggest that I didn't belong here... I went off."

This sense of ownership in America reflects the New England origins of his family, but just as important it reflects the willingness of his grandmother to discuss slavery and other aspects of the black past that older generations of African-Americans tried to forget.

In his junior year of college, Jealous led a demonstration to preserve Columbia's scholarship program for students of color. He climbed through a window of Low Memorial Hall to disrupt a board of trustees meeting and stage a sit-in, for which he was kicked out of school.

Jealous then headed to Mississippi and set his mind on acquiring some work experience. At the Jackson Advocate, he stayed true to the paper's name and was as much an activist as he was a reporter. He investigated the state prison system. He fought the effort to shrink Mississippi's historically black colleges. In his early 20s, he became the Advocate's managing editor. Later he returned to New York; Columbia had readmitted him. A year after he left the Advocate, it was firebombed, allegedly by white supremacists.

Jealous went on to become a Rhodes scholar, earning his master's degree in comparative social research. He continued his reporter-activist work as head of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a consortium of black newspapers around the country. He worked at Amnesty International USA pushing Congressional efforts to ban prison rape and racial profiling in the wake of September 11. He returned to California and served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, which funds economic inclusion and human rights grants in California. By the time Jealous came before the NAACP board seeking its presidency in 2008, he was following the path he had started walking decades earlier with his childhood protest of his school library.

"I had known him slightly before he applied," says chairman of the board Julian Bond. "[When he] came into the room I was pleasantly surprised and taken aback with both his background registering voters when he was too young to vote himself and the fact that every professional job he's had related to what we do. He had experience in the nonprofit world. He just seemed to fit. His age was an asset. It just struck me that he was the perfect package."

The NAACP board was somewhat less impressed. Jealous's resume--stints working for the black press, executing grants for nonprofits, lobbying for human rights--was standard for a social activist. But by the lights of the NAACP's recent history, Jealous's professional biography was peculiar and lacking. He had not pastored a church, he had held no elected office and he had no direct ties to the civil rights movement.

Jealous's candidacy was met with skepticism on everything from his experience to his skin tone. "That's been our buttress, our hope and our faith--the black church," NAACP board member Amos Brown told the Christian Science Monitor. "However, under the leadership of Julian Bond, that relationship has been shattered, ignored and fractured.... You are going to bring someone on board who can't inspire somebody?... He hasn't led no movement, he hasn't led no cause where black folks can say, 'This is where the man was.' A leader is out front where the people can see him. Nobody knows Benjamin Jealous."

The board ultimately split 34 to 21 in Jealous's favor. But his reward was a mixed bag. The NAACP, as a social justice organization, had tremendous clout. But for the past two decades it had mostly been led by a succession of unsteady leaders. Benjamin Chavis followed the esteemed Benjamin Hooks in 1993 and plotted to steer the NAACP toward a younger generation. But Chavis was forced out a year later after he was found to have used NAACP funds to settle a sexual harassment suit. He was followed by Myrlie Evers (widow of Medgar Evers), seen as a stabilizing force. She in turn was followed by Kweisi Mfume, whose tenure ended in 2004 amid accusations of sexual impropriety (it was alleged that Mfume rewarded sexual partners with plum jobs). Jealous's predecessor, Bruce Gordon, lasted just nineteen months.

Moreover, when Jealous was handed the reins, the NAACP was in its third year of having to dip into its endowment to continue operations. In 2007 the group laid off more than a third of its staff and closed several regional offices. And beyond the nuts-and-bolts problems, the NAACP was in the midst of the latest flare-up of an existential crisis that has haunted it since the days of W.E.B. Du Bois, its founder, one that has become more acute in the era of Obama.

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