• President/CEO of the NAACP
• Compared the Tea Party to the White Citizens Council, an American white supremacist organization formed in 1954

Benjamin Todd Jealous is the current President and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When he assumed the post in September 2008 at the age of 35, he was the youngest leader in the group’s hundred-year history. Jealous’ wife, Lia Epperson, is also closely involved in the organization, working as a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Born on January 18, 1973 in Pacific Grove, California, Jealous is the son of a mixed racial couple – Ann Todd Jealous, an African-American psychotherapist, and Fred Jealous, a white education administrator, both of whom participated in Baltimore’s desegregation movement during the 1960s.

While attending York School, a private Episcopal high school in Monterey, California, Jealous became a community organizer. At age 14, he organized a youth voter-registration drive supporting the presidential candidacy of Jesse Jackson. During his high-school years, he also spent a semester in Washington DC, working for Leon Panetta and Sam Farr, two Congressional Democrats from California.

In 1991, Jealous began working toward his undergraduate degree at New York's Columbia University, while continuing his community organizing in Harlem for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In his junior year, he led a series of campus campaigns for economic, racial, and social justice, which involved protests and pickets. In one incident, while calling for the preservation of Columbia scholarships for students of color, Jealous climbed through a window of Columbia’s Low Memorial Hall, disrupting a meeting of the board of trustees. Jealous and three other student leaders were subsequently suspended from Columbia.

Jealous then moved to Mississippi to take an organizing position with the AFL-CIO. In one of the labor federation’s prominent campaigns in that state, Jealous protested the closure of two historically black universities, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State. He soon joined the African-American newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, initially as a graphic designer and then as an investigative reporter.

In 1997, Jealous returned to Columbia to complete his undergraduate degree in political science. He then traveled to England to do graduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. In 1999, upon receiving his Master's degree in comparative social research, he returned to the United States to take the position of executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a media federation of more than 200 black-community newspapers.

In 2002, Jealous joined Amnesty International (AI) to run its U.S. Domestic Human Rights Program. Along with an AI researcher, Niaz Kasravi, Jealous in 2004 authored a 50-page AI report on racial profiling -- titled “Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States” -- that received national and international media attention upon its publication. The authors argued that “racial profiling affects a staggering number of people in the United States” and called on the federal government to pass sweeping reforms. The “scope of racial profiling in the United States has expanded since September 11, 2001,” Jealous and Kasravi concluded. “While some law enforcement officers apparently believe that it is effective for apprehending criminals, recent and historical examples suggest the practice actually makes us less safe.”

In 2005, Jealous left AI to become president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a California-based grant-making organization.

After NAACP president Bruce Gordon resigned in March 2007, the organization's presidential search committee selected Jealous and two others, Reverend Frederick Haynes and former White House adviser Alvin Brown, from a pool of 200 candidates. In May of 2008, a three-person executive committee forwarded Jealous’s candidacy to the NAACP's executive council, but Jealous received only 34 of 55 votes from the board in an election that revealed a schism within the organization.

Although NAACP chairman Julian Bond was firmly behind Jealous, other board members expressed concern and even indignation. According to national board member Amos Brown:

“[O]ur buttress, our hope and our faith [has been] the black church […] 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.”

Jealous overcame such doubts to become president of the NAACP and had his most controversial moment in 2010, at the organization’s yearly convention, when the NAACP voted to pass a resolution condemning “racist” elements in the Tea Party. Addressing the convention, Jealous characterized the Tea Party as a white supremacist movement: “Here comes the genetic descendent of the White Citizens Council, burst from its coffin, carrying signs and slogans like ‘Lynch Barack Hussein Obama.’” In the media firestorm that ensued, Jealous declared that “for more than a year we’ve watched as Tea Party members have called congressmen the N-word, have called congressmen the F-word. We see them carry racist signs and whenever it happens, the membership tries to shirk responsibility.”

On July 19, 2010, when an Andrew Breitbart website posted an edited video of U.S. Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod speaking at an NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner and appearing to make racist remarks, Jealous quickly jumped at the opportunity to show his even-handedness. Without obtaining the full video, which was in the possession of the NAACP, Jealous immediately denounced Sherrod. The next day, July 20, the full video of Sherrod's speech was posted on the Internet. In that context, it became evident that Sherrod's comments, while they revealed her belief that white racism remained a widespread problem in America, were not racist. Jealous retracted his condemnation of Sherrod, stating that “we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing [Sherrod] had harmed white farmers because of racial bias.”

At the NAACP national convention in July 2012, Jealous likened the NAACP’s “fight” against voter-ID laws that had been passed in several states to the civil-rights battles of the 1960s. Suggesting that America was again facing "Selma and Montgomery times," he said:

"We must overwhelm the rising tide of voting suppression with the high tide of registration and mobilization and motivation and protection. Simply put, the NAACP will never stand by as any state tries to encode discrimination into law.... Our democracy is literally under attack from within. We have wealthy interests seeking to buy elections and when that ain't enough, suppress the vote. There is no battle that is more important or urgent to the NAACP right now than the battle to preserve democracy itself. Let me be very clear, our right to vote is the right upon which our ability to defend every other right is leveraged."

Jealous is an advisory board member of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Another noteworthy member of that board is Georgetown University law professor David Cole.