Dec 11 2024 29 mins 5
Ben Jealous has a long and deeply personal perspective on the fight for social and environmental justice.
Jealous was elected president and CEO of the NAACP in 2008 at the age of 35, making him the youngest person to lead America’s oldest civil rights organization. Since 2022, he has been the executive director of the Sierra Club, the first person of color to lead one of the country’s oldest and largest environmental organizations.
In exploring his own history, Jealous learned that he is a descendent of Robert E. Lee and a former slave. He told this personal story in a memoir published last year, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing.”
Jealous has been working on the front lines of American politics. He was a surrogate for Bernie Sanders in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, and in 2018 ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Maryland.
After election day this year, Jealous wrote a letter to his children, nieces and nephews. He reassured them, “All of you descend from families that have been here since the very beginning of our nation and have survived and ultimately triumphed over tougher times.”
Jealous told The Vermont Conversation that he hoped to give his young family members “a little bit of the wisdom I got from my grandparents. Which is, whatever we're dealing with, it's been worse in this country and we still triumph over it. And I also wanted them to understand that our obligation was to fight.”
Jealous was in Vermont this weekend where he spoke at an event sponsored by the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club.
Jealous blames Kamala Harris’s loss on her failure to champion people’s everyday economic concerns that Bernie Sanders had centered in his presidential campaigns. “What was clear back in 2016 is that Bernie's focus on the betrayal that was NAFTA, on the need for a better health care system, and on the need, most importantly, to really center kitchen table issues that vex all families across this country was something that was having a transformative and realigning impact on the electorate.”
“Corporate Democrats are afraid of that,” Jealous continued. "They are really dominated by a set of consultants who are as addicted to power as they are to corporate cash and they really make it hard for mainstream Democrats to deviate from that.”
Jealous said that under Trump, progressives need to work with people with whom they disagree and who make them uncomfortable. He cited his work with conservative senators to advance environmental issues.
“Hope is a discipline,” said Jealous. “My grandmother, who was the granddaughter of three enslaved people and a white man in Virginia, she would always say pessimists are right more often. But optimists win more often.”
Jealous said that his grandmother “saw life like a boxing match. Any battle usually has like 12 rounds. And if you got in every round expecting to get beat up and knocked down, you probably quit by the fourth.”
“But if you got in every round thinking that this might be the round you don't get knocked down, that you're focused on the victory, and by the time you get to the 12th you realize all you got to do is be the last one standing, at the end of that round, you've won everything.”
