NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous has announced he will step down from his position leading the 104-year-old civil rights organization by the end of the year.
The question is, what legacy does the 40-year-old leader leave for the NAACP?
The answer is a more invigorated, dynamic and relevant civil rights movement.
At the age of 35, Jealous assumed the leadership of the largest and oldest civil rights organization in 2008. He was the youngest CEO in the history of the NAACP, and with degrees from Columbia and Oxford, the Rhodes Scholar is arguably the best educated to lead.
On a basic level, Ben Jealous is credited with growing the organization during his tenure, including expanding the NAACP’s donor base from 16,000 to over 132,000 people, its online activists from 175,000 to over 675,000, and increasing total activists to over 1 million people.
Further, under his direction, the NAACP has delved into the cutting-edge issues facing the U.S., and the Black community in particular. In the area of criminal justice, the NAACP has operated at the front lines of the battle against an unjust and racially biased U.S. death penalty. Jealous made the NAACP a major player in the repeal of the death penalty in Connecticut and in Maryland, where the organization’s headquarters are based.
And the group was part of the effort to save Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia two years ago this month, despite serious problems in the murder case and strong evidence pointing to Davis’ innocence.
With respect to voting rights, the NAACP was engaged in a massive voter registration campaign for the 2012 election, the largest in the organization’s history. The NAACP deployed 2,300 volunteers across the country, registering 374,553 voters and mobilizing 1.2 million voters to go to the polls on Election Day. Black voter participation is now higher than for any other demographic group, and the NAACP can take its share of the credit for making that happen.
For those who have observed the NAACP over the years, there is no denying that the rise of Ben Jealous represents a new template for the civil rights movement.
Despite their years of success at fighting segregation and breaking down barriers – or perhaps because of them – some old-guard civil rights organizations became old, rusty, dusty and threatened with irrelevance.
However, the NAACP under Ben Jealous has mobilized a new generation around a new host of issues, such as stop and frisk in New York, immigrants’ rights and Arizona’s racial profiling law, and marriage equality.
In 2010, NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn racial extremism in the tea party, as the organization boldly released a report tying white nationalist groups and militias to the tea party movement.
To be sure, there were missteps and distractions for Jealous, the most notable being the debacle over his statements surrounding Shirley Sherrod, a Black USDA official who was forced to resign after a doctored video surfaced, in which she spoke at an NAACP fundraiser in Georgia and spoke about discriminating against a white farmer who sought government help.
But then again, bold leadership means sticking one’s neck out, and even making mistakes at times. Dynamic leaders such as Ben Jealous have helped to put the boldness back in black leadership. Given the myriad challenges facing America, and the rollback of civil rights, that is a good thing.
