By: E&P Staff Ben Jealous, a former executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association/ Black Press of America (NNPA) and former managing editor of the Jackson (Miss.) Advocate, was named NAACP president over the weekend.
At 35, Jealous is the youngest person ever chosen to head the nation's largest civil-rights group.
"I'm excited," Jealous said, according to an Associated Press account by ERRIN HAINES and BEN NUCKOLS. "I think that it's a real affirmation that this organization is willing to invest in the future, to invest in the ideas and the leadership of the generation that is currently raising black children in this country."
Jealous, a Rhodes scholar and graduate of Columbia University, began his career with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as a community organizer in Harlem in 1991. He later became managing editor of the black-oriented Advocate in Mississippi.
From 1999 to 2002, Jealous was executive director of the NNPA, the nation's largest association of publishers of black-oriented newspapers.
He most recently worked for Amnesty International.
Jealous begins his term as NAACP's 17th president in September.
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