He's very Obama, isn't he?
The Ivy creds. The biracial parentage. The lawyer wife. The victory, after some contentious balloting, of his more youthful candidacy over the more establishment one.
The selection of Benjamin Jealous this weekend as the new president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People puts a decidedly fresh face on an organization that many have criticized as too rooted in the past. At 35, he is the civil rights organization's youngest president ever, and by picking him, board members seem to be saying, "This is not your father's NAACP."
What makes his rise noteworthy is that, like Barack Obama, Jealous didn't come up through church activism, the traditional launching pad for previous generations of black leaders. Neither arrives with "the reverend" title before his name, which had become almost standard, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
And, in fact, a bone of contention in his selection - which took place at a closed-door meeting of the NAACP board at a BWI hotel this weekend - appears to have been a lingering desire among some members to rally behind a more traditional choice, the Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III, pastor of a megachurch in Dallas.
Haynes is described by the Dallas Morning News as a protege of Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and apparently had the support of at least several fellow ministers on the NAACP board. One of them complained to The Sun's Kelly Brewington of an "anti-preacher sentiment" among his colleagues. And another minister, the Rev. Wendell Anthony of Detroit, issued a news release after the vote to note that while the new president had "a great deal of potential," Jealous was not his first choice and that he would have preferred Haynes.
The board ultimately went with Jealous - by a 34-21 vote, Brewington was told - but the fact that picking the president took eight hours, until 3 in the morning Saturday, reflects a considerable split.
But in a year in which change is in the air - or at least at Obama rallies - the selection has created buzz about a group that some had dismissed as no longer relevant.
At 38, Lester Spence, a Johns Hopkins professor who specializes in black politics, is closer in age to the hip-hop generation that figures often in his research than to the 1960s-era civil rights movement - as is Jealous.
