CINCINNATI - NAACP delegates left the 99th annual convention here yesterday hopeful that its young president-elect can successfully bring the nation's oldest civil rights organization into a new century.
Although they caught only a glimpse of Benjamin Todd Jealous, 35, many delegates of the Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said they were impressed by what they heard and saw. After going a year and a half without a president while battling financial troubles and dwindling membership, the NAACP has an opportunity to reinvent itself under Jealous, they said.
"I think it's a start of a new beginning," said George Young, a retired firefighter from Jacksonville, Fla. "If we don't come into the 21st century, it will be over for us."
Maria Macon of Ackerman, Miss., said she hoped that reluctant NAACP veterans would trust Jealous to shape the group's vision. "With past presidents, the leadership left no latitude," she said. "And they clashed. He needs the latitude, but they must also have faith and confidence in the direction he takes. Let's pray that happens."
Jealous, who received high praise from Chairman Julian Bond, was elected in May by a split 64-member board of directors. Opponents worried that his civil rights background was too thin. Jealous and the board are still working out the details of his contract.
"I think he's done a decent job of trying to sell himself," said J. Whyatt Mondesire, a board member from Philadelphia. "He has a very uphill battle because he has no history in this organization. But we would do nothing to try to hurt him or embarrass him."
Jealous plans to start in September, after three years as executive director of the San Francisco-based Rosenberg Foundation, an organization that supports social justice organizations. Before that, he worked for Amnesty International and was executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization of 200 black-owned community newspapers.
A Rhodes scholar, Jealous has told NAACP delegates that his interest in civil rights blossomed early. He told his family he wanted to become a civil rights lawyer at age 7. At 14, he conducted his first voter registration drive.
In his first remarks to the membership, Jealous said he recognized that the NAACP is at a critical crossroads and pledged to keep it relevant in the modern era. He also referred his civil rights credentials, highlighting his family's activism. His mother, Ann Todd Jealous, raised in Baltimore, was among the first students to integrate Western High School.
