Activism started with his family. His mother, Ann Todd Jealous, who is black, is a psychotherapist from Baltimore who participated in Western High School's desegregation. His father, Fred Jealous, who is white, runs a school for middle-aged men and participated in Baltimore sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters.
Jealous attended public elementary and middle schools and went to a private Episcopal high school in Monterey. He spent summers as a boy with his grandmother in Baltimore.
He became conscious of his own mixed race and the issues that came with it at a very young age.
"The issue of race was always there," Jealous said. "When your mom's black and your dad's white and it's the 1970s, it's in your face all the time."
He added: "I can remember getting into a fight with a kid ... because he said I was rich because I had a nanny. He assumed the black woman who picked me up every day was my nanny."
It was his mother.
Jealous always showed an activist streak, relatives say. In preschool he got into a debate with his teacher about why he needed to take a nap when he wasn't tired, his grandmother, Mamie Todd, 91, recalled. His mother says that in the first grade he asked the librarian why they didn't have more books on African-Americans.
And as a teenager, his father took him to an event promoting Jesse Jackson's candidacy for president, and Jealous immediately signed up to organize youth to get out the vote.
Jealous attended Columbia University, where he protested everything from financial aid policy changes to the school's plan to turn the ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated into a biomedical research center. He was also a community organizer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Harlem.
"His leadership qualities have always stood out," said Judith Russell, who was a political science professor at Columbia and Jealous' adviser and teacher. "Not in an impulsive or rowdy or boisterous way. He just has a quality for measured evaluation, and he has a lot of passion.
"I've been teaching here 25 years or so, and I have a lot of amazing young people in my life. Every now and then you get intelligence and principles and courage and passion, and they kind of come together. And that's Ben. He just stands out."
