- Civil Rights
- Criminal Justice
- Police Accountability
Ben Jealous serves as president of People For the American Way.
Jealous has decades of experience as a leader, coalition builder, campaigner for social justice and seasoned nonprofit executive. In 2008, he was chosen as the youngest-ever president and CEO of the NAACP. During his tenure, he doubled the organization’s budget, grew its online activist base by hundreds of thousands and increased its number of donors eightfold, from 16,000 to 132,000. He also positioned the organization at the forefront of critical social justice issues such as the Trayvon Martin case, the fight against voter ID laws and major protests over the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policies. He pushed for the organization to fight more aggressively for marriage equality, led efforts to register 374, 000 voters and mobilize 1.2 million new voters to the polls, and worked to pass key legislative accomplishments during President Obama’s first term, most notably the Affordable Care Act.
In 2013, the Baltimore Sun named Jealous Marylander of the Year for his work on marriage equality, abolishing the death penalty and passing the DREAM Act. Jealous was the 2018 Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland, and most recently served as a partner at Kapor Capital. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and he has taught at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.
Ben Jealous's Areas of Expertise
All Posts
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Blog Post | July 26, 2021
Whitewashing History and Suppressing Voters Go Hand in Hand
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Blog Post | July 20, 2021
People For President Ben Jealous in The Hill on Lewis Anniversary
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Blog Post | July 16, 2021
Texas Democrats Are Getting into ‘Good Trouble’
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Blog Post | July 2, 2021
The Insurrection and the Lost Cause
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Blog Post | June 25, 2021
New Hope on Shelby Anniversary
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Blog Post | June 21, 2021
Three Urgent Steps to Defend Democracy from Cynics and Skeptics
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Blog Post | June 15, 2021
THE NATION: The Right’s War on History and Truth
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Blog Post | June 14, 2021
Black Churches Have Moral Authority to Defend the Black Vote
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Blog Post | June 7, 2021
Power and Pride to the People!
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Blog Post | June 1, 2021
Don’t Let Senate Republicans Keep Us From Learning the Truth About the Attack on the Capitol