NAACP Chooses Youngest President Ever

(AP)  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 Saturday. He was formally introduced later Saturday and will take over as president in September.

"I'm excited," Jealous told The Associated Press. "I think that it's a real affirmation that this organization is willing to invest in the future, to invest in the ideas and the leadership of the generation that is currently raising black children in this country."

Though he is not a politician, minister or civil rights icon, 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 Bruce 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. Dennis Courtland Hayes had been serving as interim president and chief executive officer.

Jealous was born in Pacific Grove, California, and educated at Columbia University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

He began his professional life in 1991 with the NAACP, where he worked as a community organizer with the Legal Defense Fund.

During the mid 1990s, Jealous was managing editor of the Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest black newspaper.

From 1999 to 2002, Jealous led the country's largest group of black community newspapers as executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

Jealous left the Publishers Association for Amnesty International to direct its U.S. Human Rights Program, for which 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.

Since 2005, Jealous has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private institution that supports civil and human rights advocacy. His experiences caught the attention of the NAACP's search committee, and Jealous said mentors encouraged him to take the job.

"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," he 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."

The NAACP was founded in 1909 by an interracial coalition that battled segregation and lynching and helped win some of the nation's biggest civil rights victories. But in the wake of racial advances, the organization has struggled financially.

Jealous said blacks in America still have difficulties 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 affect change in their communities.

Jealous - whose resume doesn't reflect a record of longevity in the workplace - said he's ready to settle in for the long haul. He has spent much of his life in California but has roots in Baltimore, where the NAACP is based. His mother was born in Baltimore, and his parents met while teaching at a junior high school in the city.

"As a black child growing up in this country, there was no higher ambition possible than to lead the NAACP," he said. "No one should be concerned about me going anywhere too soon."

[grammawhamma]

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So what exactly is a "colored" person? I have never ever seen a person that was colorless...have any of you?

[okcnfrcr]

sorry, cont- We can point fingers about the system and the such but if so many kids across this nation are failing to complete, even the basic of schooling, then there is a family breakdown in guidance. You have the rap industry which is bolstered by gangs who use their songs and hate rhetoric to fire up the uneducated into not studying and not cooperating with law enforcement authorities. There is nothing in my book that kept me from arresting someone of any color if someone wanted to press charges. You have had and still have gangs who have taken over communities and are using their strength to hold their communities hostage. The NAACP and the families need to walk the streets where the gangs are located and face down the bangers and drug dealers. But it takes a set of B---s to do that. I am sure the local enforcement agencies would walk with them in this effort. No sir, I''m not naive. I am very realistic and tired of a proud organization like the NAACP, failing to actually measure up to their job.

[okcnfrcr]

brianbwb, sorry not naive at all and recognize there probably still is discrimination in place but will stand by my analysis that the NAACP needs to attack the street gangs/drug dealers and other crimes being perpetrated by the blacks in, especially, the bigger cities. I have witnessed more than you know about the family circumstances which help hold down kids from reaching further into the educational system. This doesn''t just speak of the black communities. This can go through all levels of ethnicity and race. The NAACP is like the old labor unions who at one time were established to achieve a better wage and working conditions for their constituents but have failed to keep pace with Modern society. The unions brought in a spokesman for workers'' rights and wages and raised the wages but then have bargained themselves out of jobs by protecting lazy incompetent workers and pricing their jobs and benefits so high that factories closed and moved out of the country. The NAACP stood up for minority rights and fought to remove certain barriers but now sit back on their butts and only scream racist rhetoric instead of helping to attack the problem. (cont_)

[ralan40]

The irony of the name and ''color'' of the new leader of this racist organization is not lost on me.

Racism is racism regardless what ''color'' the people involved appear to be.

[thewatcher6]

My experience with the organization back in the 60''s left me with a dislike for the organization. It have outlived its publicity seeking usefullnes. In this day and age if the NAACP has aright to exist then lets give the KKK the right to exist. Smith and Wesson has made all of us equal.
As a dark skinned American I resent waking up every morning and being reminded by the radio, before I get out of bed that I am Black and the playing field is not level.
It is time we get a life, get over it...

[perceptions5]

NAACP really should dis-band.

They are no longer a creditable organization but instead just another Democrat "special interest" group.

Their "too-close" ties with the Democrat party aren''t helping the poor people in America''s "deep blue one-party cities" where there is nothing but poverty and despair.

Look we have 100''s of thousands of innocent children dropping out of our "deep blue one-party cites" every year. These children, most of them, will NEVER live a life like most Americans because without an education data shows that these children will live a life in poverty.

All Americans need to be concerned for "increasing" the graduation rates for black children in our deep blue cities.

78% dropout by Black American males in Baltimore is unexceptable. (NAACP is headquartered in Baltimore)

24% graduation rate in Detroit is unexceptable.

If Democrats and the NAACP want to be perceived as "helping" poor Black people ..........then they should "really" help poor people.

Where am I wrong?

[brianbwb-2009]

"Interesting that Jealous did not mention the need to go out into the community to stop all the gang bangin..." Posted by dowjones20k

You mean like what we are doing in Iraq, or like the police do in our own neighborhoods?

"drug selling..." Posted by dowjones20k

Like the Pharmaceutical industry?

murdering thug behavior, Posted by dowjones20k

Again, like Iraq?

"not to mention taking care of thier children..." Posted by dowjones20k

Like vetoing the expansion of health coverage to more needy children?

"and stop glamorizing rap music..." Posted by dowjones20k

As if that was any different from "metal" rock, we should refuse to take one of the all too few legal roads out of poverty?

"educate and teach responsibility." Posted by dowjones20k

In a system that has had it''s budget gutted, and is so obsolete that even "White" children score lower than many developing countries?

[brianbwb-2009]

"I was told if I went out and got an education and worked hard, there could be a world opened up for me. Any lack of advancement has been of my own failure to "advance" myself through education." Posted by okcnfrcr

How naive.

Or intentionally obfuscatory.

There are many people of all ethnic stripe who have been well educated, or who have educated themselves, only to find that no amount of education will convince racist money markets to invest in their businesses, convince insurers that they deserve the same rate as the "favored" group, because of equal qualification and similar circumstance.

A vastly disproportionate number of "Black" Americans have discovered this, and have endured generations of such abuse.

Whoever told you that "if you went out and got an education and worked hard, there could be a world opened up for you", was one of those who pretends that racism no longer exists.

[brianbwb-2009]

Posted by MyOpinion1

If a "White" African American immigrant wishes to call himself, or herself an African American, they have that right. If they are South African, there is a good chance that their ancestry was Dutch. Why would they call themselves American, and as you put it "want their name back", when no one has taken it from them?

The term exists because we are Americans, who by dint of the ignorance, fear, guilt, and greed of the descendants of the slave holders, continue to regard us as less than full Americans, with equal rights and responsibilities, we are indeed a "different type" of American.

The term African American is a reminder of the inhumanity that was, and to this day still is endured by the descendants of people stolen from their homes, worked as beasts of burden, then treated as unwanted chattel once slavery became illegal.

If you are uncomfortable with the reminder of your inhumanity, then good, that is the purpose of it, and it apparently is successful in at least one case.

[dowjones20k]

Interesting that Jealous did not mention the need to go out into the community to stop all the gang bangin, drug selling, murdering thug behavior, not to mention taking care of thier children, and stop glamorizing rap music .... educate and teach responsibility.

I find it odd that these core value problems do not seem to ever register on the NAACP radar. Just continue to blame society and maybe they will go away.

Maybe its because they would have to be honest with themsleves first instead of blaming everything but the root of the problems?