Benjamin Todd Jealous
Ben Jealous was the youngest President and CEO in the history of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Today he is a Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice, teaching social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and criminal justice reform. His course, Leading Social Change, maps three paths to large-scale change: building companies that change the world, passing laws, and running for office. He has done all three.
His organizing is rooted in the Southern abolitionist and post-Reconstruction populist movements that run deep in his own family. His first teacher was his grandmother, Mamie Bland Todd, a 1953 graduate of Penn’s School of Social Work, who helped build Maryland’s child protective services and became a leader of the state’s war on poverty. Jealous learned the work from her as she learned it from her own grandfather, Edward David Bland — born enslaved in Virginia, later a three-term state legislator who helped forge the biracial Readjuster coalition that restored funding to the Commonwealth’s imperiled free public schools.
At eighteen, he joined the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, spending years mobilizing mothers to help save a neonatal intensive care unit in Harlem. Suspended from Columbia for leading student protests, he went to Mississippi. There, alongside Stacey Abrams and Derrick Johnson, he organized to stop a governor’s plan to turn one public historically Black university into a prison, close a second, and force the third to become majority White. The colleges stayed open. The prison was never built. He would later lead the Rosenberg Foundation, a California social-justice philanthropy, before returning to the NAACP.
Working directly with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he helped keep a South African teenager off Mississippi’s death row. As NAACP president, Jealous became a practiced builder of bipartisan coalitions, moving landmark legislation at the state level. Reaching across every line — to conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, and to Republican governors from California to Virginia — he worked to shrink the prison system, restore voting rights, and win the freedom of Jamie and Gladys Scott, two sisters serving life in Mississippi for a robbery that took as little as eleven dollars. In five years, he helped end the death penalty in four states. In 2011, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appointed him to the Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, which studied how school finance shapes educational opportunity.
As a partner at Kapor Capital, he backed more than thirty seed-stage founders building companies in health, fintech, public safety, and workforce, working to widen access to capital for entrepreneurs long shut out of venture funding. After five years investing in Silicon Valley, he established his own investment office in Baltimore, backing nontraditional founders across the country. Before joining Penn, he taught at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and he served as a mentor-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University’s FastForward accelerator. The World Economic Forum has named him a Young Global Leader.
Since first stepping into leadership three decades ago, he has helped launch the careers of a generation of leaders in civil rights, tech, and politics. His national best-seller, *Reach*, helped launch BMe, a national network of social entrepreneurs. His most recent book, *Never Forget Our People Were Always Free*, chosen as SP2’s One Book in 2023, traces his family across the class and color lines of American history. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds degrees from Columbia and Oxford. A former trustee of Morehouse College, he is a current trustee of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.