Ben Jealous

Jealous's parents met in Baltimore in 1966.

At the time, they did not openly date each other in public; when they went to the movies, they took separate paths to adjacent seats to hide their relationship.

As an interracial couple, they were prohibited by state law from marrying in Maryland before 1967.

They married in Washington, D.C., and returned to live in Baltimore for a time before moving to California in the early-1970s.

As a child, Jealous was sent to Baltimore to spend his summers with his maternal grandparents, who lived in the Ashburton neighborhood.

Benjamin Todd Jealous (born January 18, 1973) is an American civil rights leader, environmentalist and executive director of the Sierra Club.

Jealous was born in 1973 in Pacific Grove, California, and grew up on the Monterey Peninsula.

His mother, Ann Jealous (née Todd), is biracial.

She worked as a psychotherapist and had grown up in Baltimore.

She had participated there in the desegregation of Western High School.

Jealous graduated from York School in Monterey, California in 1990.

Jealous's father was best friends with comedian Dave Chappelle's father, William David Chappelle III; as a result, Jealous has been friends with Dave Chappelle since childhood, and the two are god-brothers.

Jealous earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Columbia University.

A Rhodes Scholar, he later earned a Master of Science in comparative social research from St Antony's College, Oxford.

At Columbia University, Jealous began working as an organizer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

As a student, he protested the university's plan to turn the Audubon Ballroom (the site of Malcolm X's assassination) into a research facility and was suspended.

During his suspension, Jealous traveled through the South.

During this time Mississippi's three black colleges were slated to be closed because of financial difficulties.

Jealous organized with the local NAACP chapter to keep them fully funded and maintain their operations.

While in Mississippi, Jealous began working as a reporter for Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest historically black newspaper, under the tutelage of publisher Charles Tisdale.

He eventually became its managing editor.

His reporting was credited with exposing corruption among high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman.

In addition, he helped acquit a small farmer who had been wrongfully accused of arson.

Jealous returned to Columbia in 1997, where he applied for and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

After completing his degree at Oxford and returning to the US, Jealous worked as executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers.

During his term, he relocated the organization's editorial office to Howard University in Washington, D.C. He set up an online syndicated news service that shared content with all of the organization's member papers.

He served as the president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 2008 to 2013.

When he was selected to head the NAACP at age 35, he became the organization's youngest-ever national leader.

The Washington Post in 2013 described him as "one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders."

In 2013, Jealous was named a Young Global Leader by the Davos World Economic Forum.

She is the author, with Caroline Haskell, of Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism (2013).

His father, Fred Jealous, who is white, is descended from settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, related to businessman Joseph B. Sargent, and directly in line to inherit the fortune from the Sargent and Co business.

He founded the Breakthrough Men's Community and participated in Baltimore sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters.

Jealous ran for governor of Maryland in the 2018 election.

He ran as a Democrat, and won the party's nomination in the June 2018 primary, defeating Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker and seven other candidates.

However, he lost in the general election to the incumbent governor, Republican Larry Hogan.

Jealous is a partner at Kapor Capital, board chairman of the Southern Elections Fund and one of the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professors at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.

Jealous was selected as president of People for the American Way, and its associated foundation, on June 2, 2020, and assumed the position on June 15.

On November 14, 2022, Jealous was named the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to hold the position, effective January 23, 2023.

Jealous' 2023 book, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing was released on January 10, 2023.