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People

A Leader Emerges Ben Jealous and the NAACP

Jeffrey MacMillan

Alameda’s Quiet Life Is Behind Him … for Now

   Last spring, neighbors might have viewed Benjamin Todd Jealous as just another proud owner of an old house in Alameda and an all-around regular guy. He likes restoring things, for instance, and was even featured on a television show in which his backyard was redesigned and landscaped around a giant old oak tree.
    But his seemingly quiet, homebody life in Alameda ended last May, when the high-powered National Association for the Advancement of Colored People tapped the equally high-powered Jealous to be its new president and CEO. At 35, Jealous became the youngest-ever president of the nation’s largest civil rights organization, and his appointment—along with Barack Obama’s presidential victory—has energized activists in the Bay Area and beyond.
    “It’s this incredible moment in history,” Jealous said in the ramp-up to Barack Obama’s election, “to come on in a moment like this, when a black man has a real shot at the presidency, it’s just incredible.” And in a short television interview on Election Night, Jealous said, “We have been working for this for 100 years. We’re very proud and very excited.” Jealous exudes presence in a room. He is stocky, self-confident and comfortable working a crowd. His handshake is big, wide and strong, and when he takes the dais at an event, with his youthful voice making rat-a-tat points, he radiates the self-confidence of an evangelical minister. One on one, Jealous listens intently, his brow furrowed in concentration.
    Jealous brings experience, education and a new level of excitement to the NAACP. After gaining an undergraduate degree in political science at Columbia University, he earned a master’s degree in comparative social research at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He served as executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers), and then served as managing editor of the activist-oriented Jackson (Miss.) Advocate newspaper, tapping his passion for civil rights.
    “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 says in a statement. “He is a perfect match. … We are looking forward to a great future under his leadership.”
    Jealous succeeds telecommunications executive Bruce Gordon, who served as NAACP president for two years. Gordon offered a surprise resignation in 2007 after a long-running disagreement regarding internal procedure with the group’s 64-member board.
    The NAACP, founded in 1909 by W.E.B. DuBois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett to fight black lynching, claims 500,000 members. Jealous is a noted fundraiser who led the high-profile, nonprofit Rosenburg Foundation, the private San Francisco organization that advocates for the rights of working people and immigrants. He also directed the U.S. Human Rights Program for Amnesty International and worked with the nonprofit PowerPAC—an organization that raises funds for voter education and mobilization. At the NAACP, Jealous is charged with building membership, especially among young and middle-aged adults, and also with raising money for the organization.
    Both of his parents are civil rights activists, and Jealous organized his first voter registration drive at the age of 14 in Pacific Grove, on the Monterey Peninsula, where his parents moved because it reminded them of his father’s home state of Maine. After graduating from Columbia, Jealous moved to Mississippi and worked as a field organizer on a successful campaign to stop the state’s plan to close two of its three public and historically black universities.
    He moved back to Northern California in 2004 to serve as president of the Rosenberg Foundation.
    The Bay Area, Jealous says, is currently a center of civil rights activism. “There’s just this brain trust in the Bay Area of black activities,” he says. “It’s a pretty incredible group I was in there.”
    His group included people like Steve Phillips of San Francisco, the founder of PowerPAC.org, and Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, which currently is working on a plan to develop “green collar”—or environmentally friendly—jobs for young adults who are having trouble finding work.
    “There’s a real renaissance happening in the Bay Area amongst civil rights activists,” Jealous says. “The East Bay has always been a place for the idealistic who can also take a practical approach to accomplishing things.”
    “It does seem like a lot of the rising stars [of the civil rights movement] are out here,” says PowerPAC’s Phillips. “I hadn’t thought about it geographically, but yes, it’s definitely happening.”
    Phillips, whose organization registered thousands of new voters last year, says today’s activists are different.
    “What’s exciting about this period,” Phillips says, “is you’ve got people with extraordinary skill who also have a connection to history and who understand why this is important.”
    One of Jealous’ priorities at the NAACP is to build its membership, he says, especially among the 25 to 49 age groups. “Those people are raising their families,” he says. “We need them because they’re secure. They’re rooted in the issues we care most about—jobs, taxes and health care.”
    Jealous says he has a plan to reach out to that group of people, appealing to them through their online social networks. He helped develop “Upload to Uplift,” a viral online voter registration drive in the weeks before the presidential election, and the NAACP registered 20,000 people in the first three weeks of October 2008 using it.
    How does it work? The NAACP Web site encourages people to register to vote and pass along the link to everyone they know in their network. At the same time, Jealous implemented a way for people who register at the NAACP Web site to be able to make a donation to the organization online.
    For now, Jealous is busy in Baltimore, where the national headquarters of the NAACP is located. He still has roots in Alameda, however.
    “When I first saw Alameda, it reminded me of Pacific Grove. Lots of Craftsmans and Victorians,” he says. He says old houses appeal to him, which is why he started restoring Harlem brownstones while at Columbia.
    “I fell in love with restoring old homes,” he says. Several years ago, he and his wife, Lia Epperson, were invited by a home-improvement TV show to redesign the backyard of their Paru Street home around a live oak tree. The best part? Jealous says the project was done in three days.
    Epperson, 37, a constitutional law professor at Santa Clara University Law School, is on research leave from her position there. The couple, married in 2002, has a 3-year-old daughter, Morgan.
    “Alameda is a wonderful place to live,” Jealous says. “My wife and I and our family will always remember it fondly. That’s where we started our family.”
    Jealous has relocated his young family to Washington, D.C., and he commutes to the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore. But he’s still the proud owner of an old house in Alameda.
    “I miss Alameda,” he says. “I still own a house in Alameda, so I’ll be back.”