The nation’s oldest civil-rights group, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in Baltimore, will soon be led by the youngest president ever in its nearly 100-year history.
Benjamin Todd Jealous, 35, will take the helm of the organization in September.
Mr. Jealous is president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a San Francisco grant maker that finances projects to aid low-income families. Previously, he worked for Amnesty International, the human-rights charity in New York, where he directed its domestic program, and he has also been a newspaper editor and director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a federation of black newspapers.
“Mr. Jealous was the only one of the candidates we saw who has spent his entire professional life working on the issues we work on,” says Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP board. “He is philosophically attuned to who we are and what we do.”
The selection, however, has rankled some longtime NAACP board members who have publicly acknowledged that Mr. Jealous was not their first choice and now question his experience and leadership abilities. The new president will assume the job with something less than a mandate, as the trustee vote was 34 to 21 in favor of his appointment.
“This young man may have some gifts and qualities, but he is not fit for the leadership of this organization,” says Amos Brown, an NAACP board member who is head of the NAACP’s San Francisco chapter. “He has had no presence in black leadership at all. At best, he has been a technocrat.”
‘It Was Time’
Still, others are confident that Mr. Jealous’s age and experience — particularly his work in the charity world and the news media, and his knowledge of Internet communications — will help the venerable organization grow its membership among younger people.
“It was time for the NAACP to take this step,” says Mary Frances Berry, a member of the charity’s 15-person presidential search committee, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “There was no need to have another traditional civil-rights leader just to have another traditional civil-rights leader. What Jealous brought was youth, energy, creativity, and vision. He can connect across the generational divide, and he understands the technological changes that have taken place.”
“The fact that he is a young man sends a tremendous message that the NAACP wants to retool for the 21st century,” says Ronald Walters, director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland at College Park, and a close observer of the NAACP.
Mr. Jealous could not be reached for comment.
Challenges Ahead
Mr. Jealous will join an organization facing financial difficulties. Last June, the NAACP said a drop in donations had forced it to lay off 20 employees from its Baltimore headquarters and close some branch offices. The organization operated at a $3.8-million deficit in 2006, according to the latest available financial filings. The charity has also delayed plans to move its headquarters to the District of Columbia out of concern about costs.
He may also face governance challenges. The NAACP’s last elected president, Bruce Gordon, a telecommunications executive, resigned in March 2007 after 19 months on the job. He said working with the organization’s 64-member board was “absolutely cumbersome,” and he spoke of disagreements between board and management over his desire to see the advocacy organization perform more social-service work.
The NAACP’s general counsel, Dennis Hayes, has been serving as interim president.
Mr. Bond has said that reducing the size of the board is something the organization has considered, but he says no steps have been taken to achieve that. However, he doesn’t anticipate the same sort of managerial disagreements to occur with the group’s new president.
“Unlike Mr. Gordon, I believe Ben Jealous understands, from the very first, the board-CEO relationship,” Mr. Bond says.
Mr. Gordon came to the organization from the corporate world, and Mr. Bond and others within the NAACP had hoped that his high-ranking business contacts would prove more fruitful for fund-raising purposes. Now some think Mr. Jealous’s charity experience will give him an edge when it comes to bolstering the organization’s finances.
“He has spent almost all of his life in the nonprofit world, and in most of those positions he has shown a proven ability to raise money from a variety of sources: foundations, corporate donors, and individuals,” Mr. Bond says of Mr. Jealous. “We think he can do that for us.”
Voting Dispute
Mr. Jealous may also have to contend with anger over the process used to select him. “This young man’s candidacy was forced on the board without due process,” says Mr. Brown, the San Francisco leader.
Mr. Brown’s complaints with the selection process stem largely from what he calls the “disenfranchisement” of some West Coast board members who, he says, could not attend the meeting in Baltimore but were not told they could vote by phone.
Mr. Bond says he finds these complaints “odd” and says the NAACP has had a long tradition of allowing trustees to vote over the telephone.
He adds that the board had earlier approved the entire selection process used to choose Mr. Jealous out of a pool of some 200 candidates.
Another dissatisfied board member is Wendell Anthony, head of the organization’s Detroit chapter and a member of the selection committee. He issued a press release stating his first choice to lead the NAACP was Frederick D. Haynes III, pastor of Friendship West Baptist Church, in Dallas.
“None of the people who have come into this organization have ever been greeted 100 percent by the board,” says the University of Maryland’s Mr. Walters. “Jealous is going to have some initial detractors, especially from those who wanted a minister to head the group.”
Mr. Jealous has begun calling each board member to introduce himself and discuss the future of the organization, Mr. Bond says.
In the end, Ms. Berry says, the new president’s experience as head of the National Newspaper Publishers Association will serve him well.
“He worked with a group of very contentious black publishers,” she says. “Anybody who’s had that experience knows what it means to get along with people of different ages and different perspectives. I think it was good experience for him for working with the board.”
