Former news exec now the youngest president of NAACP

BALTIMORE — The NAACP chose activist and former news executive Ben Jealous, 35, as its president Saturday, making him the youngest leader in the 99-year history of the nation's largest civil-rights organization.

The 64-member board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People met for eight hours before selecting Jealous. He was formally introduced Saturday afternoon and will take over as president in September.

"I'm excited," Jealous said. "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."

Though he is not a politician, minister or civil-rights icon, Jealous provides the organization with a young but connected chief familiar with black leadership and social-justice issues.

He takes the helm as the NAACP's 17th president just months before the organization's centennial anniversary and as the group looks to boost its coffers.

"There are a small number of groups to whom all black people in this country owe a debt of gratitude, and the NAACP is one of them," Jealous said.

He succeeds Bruce Gordon, who resigned abruptly in March 2007. Gordon left after 19 months, citing clashes with board members over management style and the NAACP's mission as his reasons for leaving. Dennis Courtland Hayes had been serving as interim president and chief executive officer.

Jealous was born in Pacific Grove, Calif., and educated at Columbia University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

He began his professional life in 1991 with the NAACP, where he worked as a community organizer with the Legal Defense Fund on issues of health-care access in Harlem. His family boasts five generations of NAACP membership.

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.

Jealous left the Publishers Association for Amnesty International to direct its U.S. Human Rights Program, for which he successfully lobbied for federal legislation against prison rape, public disapproval of racial profiling after Sept. 11, and exposure of widespread sentencing of children to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Since 2005, Jealous has served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private institution that supports civil- and human-rights advocacy.

The NAACP was founded in 1909 by an interracial coalition that battled segregation and lynching and helped win some of the nation's biggest civil-rights victories. But in the wake of racial advances, the organization has struggled financially.