- 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 | May 25, 2021
A Somber Anniversary
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Blog Post | May 25, 2021
It’s Time for a Black Woman on the Supreme Court
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Blog Post | May 18, 2021
Ted Cruz’s Wildly Dishonest Defense of Voter Suppression
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Blog Post | May 18, 2021
THE ADVOCATE: Act Locally to End Anti-Black, Anti-LGBTQ Police Violence
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Blog Post | May 11, 2021
Greater Justice is Coming: Taking on Abusive and Deadly Policing with New DOJ Leadership
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Blog Post | May 5, 2021
Chauvin Is Guilty. Our Work Is Cut Out for Us.
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Blog Post | May 1, 2021
D.C. Statehood Is a Voting Rights Issue… and Racial Justice Issue
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Blog Post | April 25, 2021
THE HILL: For true law enforcement accountability, change must come from the bottom up
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Blog Post | April 22, 2021
We Urgently Need Kristen Clarke at the Justice Department
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Blog Post | April 15, 2021
Biden Offers Diverse Judicial Nominees