News that Benjamin Todd Jealous planned to step down as the NAACP’s president and CEO caught almost everyone off guard this past September. By all accounts, Jealous had been doing a stellar job. Even Pittsburgh-based Republican strategist Lenny McAllister, who often squared off against Jealous during tumultuous public spats with the GOP and Tea Party, gives the outgoing leader a thumbs-up.
“Ben took the approach to the ever-dogged issue of racism and addressed it outside of the traditional constructs, applying new perspectives that fit our contemporary times politically and socially,” McAllister shares. “He understands that our societal cancer has become an invisible, elusive nemesis in today’s America, one that cannot be easily pinned down with ‘whites only’ signs and ‘separate but equal’ laws on the books.”
In 2008, a number of NAACP top brass were uncomfortable with handing over the reins of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization to a 35-year-old upstart with “new perspectives.” Never mind that Jealous had revived the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a consortium of black newspapers; served as Amnesty International’s U.S. Human Rights Program director; and was president of the Rosenberg Foundation.
But the NAACP was an entirely different ball game. The civil rights organization was publicly drowning in debt, singed by scandal and fighting for relevance in the new millennium. Yet, Jealous proved capable for the difficult challenge, surpassing the expectations of most.
Describing the NAACP as something “like a donut” when he was elected, Jealous says, “On one side, you had people who were around or below the university age; on the other side, you had people who were above or below retirement age. And in the middle, there were people like us.”
Siding with the younger demographic and Generation X, Jealous embraced more contemporary issues and put the NAACP back on a lot of people’s radars. “I found his fight on the issues of Stop and Frisk, the repeal of the Rockefeller drugs laws and the student loan hikes to be so refreshing for the oldest civil rights organization to address,” remarks Baltimore talk show host and community activist Farajii Muhammad.
These moves were very intentional. “Starting with our centennial in 2009, we started to look at whether or not we needed to be similar or different [and] we decided to be different,” shares Jealous. “Our big acts needed to change. Our big act in the 20th century was federal engagement. The real opportunity was in the courthouse. Today, it is state-level legislation. The real opportunities are in the state houses. The NAACP has changed from an organization defined by its words to an organization defined by its organizers. We realized that the future had evolved right into our sweet spot. We’re the only civil rights organization that has influence in every state.”
Hitting the ground running, Jealous embraced a five-step process of talent (“quickly assemble a top-notch team”), transparency (“track your performance and make it visible”), quick wins (“show people that, inch by inch, we’re beginning to move in the right direction”), Hail Marys (“show your ability to take a real risk and to produce a real victory”) and his fundamental J-Curve (“when you look at the letter J, and you start on the left and you move to the right, you go down and then you plateau and then you go way up”).
“The first year here was really hard,” admits Jealous. “We made a lot of mistakes that kept taking my team back to the J-Curve. But the next year, we [felt] like we were hitting our stride. And then all of a sudden we started moving up.”
Jealous and his team dug deep for its modern-day success formula.
“To attract folks, we went back to the old school,” Jealous says. “We went back to focusing on community organization. We went back to focusing on having very big, bold 50-year dreams. For example, it took us 60 years to stop the practice of lynch mob violence. The secret to our success back then was saying, ‘We will fight lynching until we win. We will fight segregation until we win.’”
An essential part of that approach is what Jealous calls “casework.” Noticeably excited and animated when talking about it, Jealous says, “It made sense [whether it was] Troy Davis, the Scott sisters, Marissa Alexander or Trayvon Martin. Casework is critical because the gateway to a terrific cause is often a great case.”
Technology is another important component. “By aggressively embracing technology [and] allowing people to do in moments what used to take hours and days by running a voter registration program online as opposed to [exclusively] in the streets, we’ve been able to make it possible for young professionals, who are raising kids and are moving up the ladder in their careers, to become active in the NAACP again.”
Jealous’ biracial background also contributed to his successful NAACP helm. As the black offspring of a white father and a black mother, Jealous describes himself as being “born on a bridge between two communities like most bridges built by black people. My father’s family disowned us, but my mother’s family refused to disown us. I’ve always felt an obligation to meet people where they were, to listen to them and to look for what we agreed on.”
This “bridging” ability aided him greatly in building the many coalitions he did, especially in the gay marriage struggle, which also owes a lot to his Bay Area upbringing, as well as the bold stance he takes on other controversial issues.
“If the battle is comprehensive immigration reform, we have to be the dog in that fight,” he says. “If the battle is Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, we have to have a dog in that fight… From the beginning, we’ve had people of all colors, including white people, who understood that white supremacy and racism dehumanizes them as well.”
All these approaches have netted huge gains. “We have always been the biggest civil rights organization in the streets. Now, we’re the biggest in the streets, online, on mobile and at the ballot box,” he beams. “We’ve gone from 175,000 activists online to 1.3 million, gone from zero people on our text list to 423,000. We’ve gone from registering approximately 124,000 voters in 2008 to registering precisely 366,851 in 2012—which made us the largest non-partisan field voter registration program.” Continuing, he adds, “We also moved 1.2 million likely and unlikely voters to the polls in 2012. That means we are more powerful and we are more multigenerational.”
Andra Gillespie, Emory University professor and author of Whose Black Politics?: Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership, observes that Jealous’ NAACP success isn’t unprecedented. “At various points, they have all turned to younger leadership to try to stay relevant,” she says of civil rights organizations and their leadership.
With all of Jealous’ success and outside praise, ‘Why step down now?’ many ask, with some speculating that NAACP heavyweights who have long been used to doing it their way aren’t completely happy with Jealous’ big, bold changes, regardless of what the numbers say. And rather than do battle with those forces, Jealous, who turns 41 on January 18, is “spending time with his family” as he plots his next big move.
“In this town, it’s pretty much uniformly discouraged [for] a man to cite ‘family’ as his reason for leaving,” Jealous says, dismissing any hint of discord. “When I was 2, my father took two years off from work, and my family went from barely getting by—we were living on subsidized housing— to being right on the federal poverty line. But he knew that, as someone who for all his life was driven by his passions, if he didn’t allow his kids to be his passion for a couple of years, he would just miss it. . . [So] there’s always been an expectation in my mind that when my kids were young, there would always be a time when they would be my top priority.”
Not up for debate, though, is his NAACP tenure. “Jealous’ legacy is one of reinvigorating the most venerable civil rights organization the nation has ever seen,” observes Tufts University professor Peniel E. Joseph, author of Waiting ’Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America.
Looking back to look forward, Jealous says, “We ultimately have two types of responsibilities in the civil rights movement. One is to preserve the civil rights that our parents and grandparents started. The other is to rise up and meet the challenges that have crept up in our lifetime. We have to then focus on making sure that every child gets a good education, has real opportunity for employment and business ownership, access to good health care and a fair justice system.” And based on his record, regardless of where he is and what he does in the future, he will never resign his commitment to civil and human rights.
Photos Courtesy: BRIAN BLANCO/epa /Corbis