Youngest leader ever picked as new NAACP president
Youngest leader ever picked as new NAACP president
The NAACP chose 35-year-old Benjamin Todd Jealous as its president Saturday, making him the youngest leader in the 99-year history of the nation's largest civil rights organization. He will take over as president in September.
Jealous was born in Pacific Grove, California and educated at Columbia University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began in 1991 with the NAACP, where he worked as a community organizer with the Legal Defense Fund working on issues of health care access in Harlem.
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.
Since 2005, Jealous has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private institution that supports civil and human rights advocacy.
"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."
Jacksonville resident and former White House senior adviser Alvin Brown was one of the three top finalists for the position of national president of the NAACP. Brown is now a senior advisor on urban policy for the Hillary Clinton campaign and is a past chairman of the National Black MBA Association. Brown held several positions in the under President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
The other finalist was the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III, senior pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
