As the youngest president in the 104-year-old NAACP’s history, Benjamin Todd Jealous is credited with infusing the organization, once seen as graying and vulnerable, with energy, modernity—and sometimes, risky stances that have rattled his board members.
On his watch over the past five years, the group doubled its budget and national staff, thanks to sometimes explosive growth in fundraising. It shook off years of scandal and torpor, racked up victories in city halls and statehouses, and registered hundreds of thousands of voters.
Now, as Mr. Jealous, 40, this week announces his resignation—citing the effect of stress on his health, a need to spend more time with his family, and a desire to start a career in education—he leaves a road map for reinvigorating nonprofit advocacy.
“While the mission of our great organization is not finished, I believe my role with it has been fulfilled,” he said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. “I am a believer in fresh blood.”
Mr. Jealous, who says he will stay at the organization until the end of the year, is leaving before his contract expires in October 2015. The board had renewed Mr. Jealous’s second contract last October.
“It’s inarguable that Ben Jealous has forcefully brought the NAACP into the 21st century,” says Van Jones, a civil-rights activist and president of Rebuild the Dream, an advocacy group.
“For me and people of my generation—people in their 30s or 40s—you couldn’t mention the term ‘NAACP’ 10 years ago without people laughing. It had become an irrelevant relic. Ben changed all that.”
Modernizing the Group
Taking the reins in October 2008, just as recession was ravaging the finances of many other organizations, Mr. Jealous managed to move the group out of the red, where it had been for six successive years. He also moved it into new advocacy paths, including pushing for solutions to curb climate change and overhaul the nation’s criminal-justice system, especially regarding prisons and sentencing practices.
He “doubled down on the future,” as he puts it, by investing in digital communication and outreach to young people. He increased the numbers and types of advocacy groups the NAACP works with, which he says broadened its reach and appeal to would-be activists and grant makers, and he created coalitions with members of the political right to advance changes in the nation’s prison system.
The group’s legacy of achievements under Mr. Jealous includes successfully leading state-level campaigns to abolish the death penalty and win the right for gays and lesbians to marry.
Last month, a coalition that included the NAACP, which had led marches against the practice, persuaded New York’s City Council to overturn the police department’s “stop-and-frisk” policies, which the group said singled out racial minorities.
Still, the organization’s high point during Mr. Jealous’s time there may have been the 2012 presidential election, when the NAACP, using a new high-tech database, registered more than 375,000 voters and got several times that number to the polls.
That campaign, say leaders of other advocacy groups who have admired Mr. Jealous’s transformation of the NAACP, epitomized his ability to modernize the organization while achieving its mission of increasing the political power of African-Americans and poor people of all colors.
“I think the NAACP can take a fair share of credit for the re-election of Barack Obama,” says Mr. Jones.
Mr. Jealous has demonstrated some methods advocacy groups can use to retool themselves to face new challenges, says Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, which has worked with the NAACP on immigration rights and voting issues.
“There was some sense before Ben came on board that there was a disconnect between what the NAACP stood for and what it was accomplishing,” she says. “He’s taken a great step toward making it work for the concerns of today, primarily jobs and justice, while engaging more young people in those battles.”
Digital Gains
While membership gains in the past five years have been relatively modest—about 9 percent, to a total of 221,000—the organization has greatly increased its advocacy and fundraising outreach under Mr. Jealous’s leadership.
A digital-media campaign Mr. Jealous started not only allows the NAACP to reach and register more potential voters but to engage younger people.
“We’ve been trying hard to reach the postcollege demographic,” says Eric Wingerter, the NAACP’s vice president for communications and digital media, whom Mr. Jealous hired in 2009. “We’re started to have success getting people who are tied to us electronically involved as donors.”
For the first time in its history, the NAACP last year raised $1-million through its Web site.
The organization has also hired many people under age 40. A leadership program started 10 years ago by Roslyn Brock, NAACP’s 48-year-old board chair and a vice president at Maryland’s Bon Secours hospital network, led the group to recruit more young board members and local chapter leaders—a model Mr. Jealous adopted as he expanded the national staff.
Many staff members at NAACP headquarters, in Baltimore, say the hirings have reinvigorated the organization.
“When you have the youngest president and board chair the organization has ever seen, and many more young people named as heads of local branches, you see people respond to an entirely different energy level,” says Sammie Dow, 26, director of the organization’s youth and college division. “It gives us much more life.”
Not a Natural Choice
Back in 2008, when Mr. Jealous was hired to lead the NAACP, the group’s reputation, as an organization primarily made up of older people who had helped wage civil-rights battles in the 1960s, kept it stuck in the past, critics charged.
Some said the organization needed to be more vocal during civil-rights battles and other events, such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which affected blacks and the poor disproportionately.
“They kept a low profile when they should have been speaking up,” says Mr. Jones.
When the organization’s leadership committee, which then included Ms. Brock, began searching for candidates to replace Bruce Gordon as president, Mr. Jealous didn’t seem like a natural choice, Ms. Brock says.
Though his family had been active in the group for several generations, he hadn’t but instead had worked for other nonprofits involved in human rights and social justice. Despite his lack of experience at NAACP, she backed his candidacy: “We were looking to jump the curve and hire someone younger.”
Julian Bond, the board chair then, says he fought hard to sell Mr. Jealous to the organization’s 64-member board. It wasn’t easy: Many board members thought of him as an outsider.
But Mr. Jealous “had fought against white supremacy and the death penalty and for the black press—all causes we had long done battle over,” says Mr. Bond, now the chairman emeritus.
What’s more, the biracial Mr. Jealous represented a hope that an NAACP leader could work across lines, both ethnically and politically, Mr. Bond says: “Our hallmark had been our ability to work to the benefit of all groups of people, but that had been obscured. Ben has brought that aspect to the fore and made it much more real than his predecessors.”
Board Struggles
A tall, burly figure with a commanding voice occasionally interrupted by a slight stutter, Mr. Jealous came to the NAACP with other bona fides. He is a Rhodes Scholar, but one with credibility as a grass-roots activist: student protests at his alma mater, Columbia University; investigative journalism in Mississippi; a turn as director of Amnesty International’s U.S. human-rights program.
The Jealous years at NAACP have been marked by their share of controversy. In his first year on the job, some advocates in other organizations complained that the NAACP was too insular and hard to communicate with.
And, particularly in his early years, Mr. Jealous’s confrontations with corporate donors like Wal-Mart and Bank of America over business practices that he felt harmed low-income people, as well as his stands on some issues, rankled several NAACP board members and chapter leaders.
For example, the group’s decision to back marriage-equality laws in several states led to the resignation of one national board member as well as some local NAACP leaders.
Winning the board over on major decisions “has been a major struggle,” says Hilary Shelton, the organization’s senior vice president for advocacy and policy.
“Here you have an organization that’s steeped in tradition and has had some success but that desperately needs to move forward,” he says. “When you have all of these people who have been leaders in their fields, you get all of these strong individual perspectives. It takes a while to sort all that out.”
Over time, the board’s ability to “manage transition” won out, Mr. Shelton says, and much of the board has gone along with the NAACP’s leaders. Only two people ended up voting against the same-sex marriage campaign last year, though several abstained.
The vote demonstrated how much progress the NAACP had made under Mr. Jealous, observers say.
“Marriage equality wasn’t an easy conversation for us to have because we have several religious leaders on our board,” says Ms. Brock. “But we’re here to battle against discrimination in all its forms. Four or five years ago, I’m not sure how the organization would have come down on it.”
Civil Rights Challenged
Mr. Jealous notes that he is leaving the NAACP at a time when the civil-rights gains of the past are being challenged. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in July to weaken the Voting Rights Act has become a major issue for the organization, which now advocates in favor of a stronger federal law to protect the rights of minorities at polling places.
The acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin in what he says was self-defense, has also become an urgent issue for the NAACP.
Under Mr. Jealous, the organization, armed with 1.7 million petition signatures, many garnered online, has spent the last several weeks encouraging Attorney General Eric Holder to press federal charges against Mr. Zimmerman for taking Mr. Martin’s life.
And Mr. Jealous emphasizes the continued need to advocate for a higher federal minimum wage, as well as programs that create jobs and train workers.
As for his organization’s future leadership, Mr. Jealous says help will likely come from within, at least in the interim.
“We’ve got a deep bench,” he says. “And we have the most gender-diverse management staff we’ve ever had.”
The NAACP will probably start a national search for a long-term leader soon, he adds.
His own career, Mr. Jealous says, will likely take a sharp turn: He is focusing on finding a job in education.
“I’m going to miss the street fighting with mayors, state senators, governors—and winning,” he says. “I’ve been an organizer since I was 18. It’s not just the end of my career as head of the NAACP. This is the end of my life as an organizer.”
CEO Expanded NAACP’s Focus and Priorities
Under the leadership of Benjamin Todd Jealous, the 104-year-old civil-rights group has broadened its priorities to include a wide range of causes. Among its areas of focus:
Fighting Racial Profiling: Pushing the federal government to charge George Zimmerman with racial bias when he took the life of Trayvon Martin.
Promoting Same-Sex Unions: Joining campaigns to push states to allow gays and lesbians to marry.
Curbing Climate Change: Collaborating with environmental and other groups to press for polices that help alleviate global warming.
Opposing the Death Penalty: Waging state-level drives to persuade lawmakers to stop sentencing convicted criminals to death.
