Everyone wants to meet the new guy. And so as Benjamin Todd Jealous works the room at Baltimore's Annie E. Casey Foundation, there is a receiving line of sorts that forms everywhere he turns.
Roslyn M. Brock, vice chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's National Board of Directors, squires the 35-year-old Californian around the reception on the second day of his new job. He is the 17th CEO and president of the NAACP, "the youngest in our history, and THAT is something," she says as applause fills the room.
Indeed, the choice of Jealous to head the nation's oldest civil rights group on the eve of its centennial was no routine decision.
A divided NAACP board picked Jealous in May in a 34-21 vote, with some members saying he was too green to lead an organization with myriad challenges. The NAACP let go about half its staff last year to dig itself out of debt. Membership has declined, and its image has suffered. Clashes with the NAACP board led the former president, Bruce S. Gordon, to leave abruptly in March 2007.
Jealous has already started raising money and over the summer made an effort to reach out to board members in person and on the phone. Now, even some vocal opponents of his selection seem comfortable with him.
"He's a young man with great training," said Amos C. Brown, NAACP board member and pastor of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco. "He's had experience in various areas, and coupling that experience with the needs of the NAACP, I think we'll have the best of both worlds in moving forward."
Brown added: "My questions earlier were regarding process and lack of information to convince me. Those questions have been answered for me."
Ronald Walters, director of the Center for African-American Leadership at the University of Maryland, College Park, said Jealous' age won't be a liability "if he does the right thing, if he brings in a new generation of people."
"To me, picking him means the board clearly had that in mind," Walters said. "There will always be some members of the board who think he's too young, and if he makes some mistake, they'll say that's because he's too young. But here's a young man who, given the range of his experiences and his abilities, I don't think age is necessarily a problem."
Jealous grew up in Pacific Grove, Calif., a liberal enclave where talk of human rights and political debates was common dinner party fodder.
