Heard on Campus: NAACP President Benjamin Jealous
Benjamin Jealous
***
We were founded to stop extra-judicial homicides – the killing of black men suspected of crimes without being properly charged. Fortunately, that has stopped, but at the same time, the undergirding aspiration (of the NAACP), which is to feel safe and secure in this country, is elusive because of high rates of homicide in the black community.
–NAACP President Benjamin Jealous at Brown University, 2/27/2009. Jealous, the civil rights organization’s youngest president ever, was a speaker at “Abraham Lincoln for the Twenty-First Century,” a symposium held by the Department of History, in celebration of the president’s 200th birthday.
Biographical Notes: Benjamin Jealous was raised in Pacific Grove, California. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Columbia University. He also holds a master’s degree in comparative social research from Oxford University, where he spent his two-year term as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to becoming the president of the NAACP, Jealous served as the President of the Rosenberg Foundation. Before that, he had been the director of the US Human Rights Program for Amnesty International.
Posted by Ajuan Mance
Posted in African Americans, Brown University, Current Events, Higher Education, NAACP, race