NAACP Pres. Ben Jealous to resign, leaves legacy of racial polarization

NAACP Pres. Ben Jealous to resign, leaves legacy of racial polarization

NAACP President Ben Jealous says he is stepping down at the end of the year to spend time with his family and pursue a career in teaching.

From ABC News:

NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous, who is credited with boosting finances at the nation’s largest civil rights organization and helping to stabilize it, said Sunday that he plans to step down at the end of the year.

The Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said that its rosters of online activists and donors have grown tremendously during his five-year tenure. Jealous was the group’s youngest-ever leader when he was hired as its president at age 35 in 2008.

In a written statement Sunday, Jealous, now 40, said he plans to pursue teaching at a university and wants to spend time with his young family.

Jealous most recently pressed for the DoJ to pursue a civil rights case against George Zimmerman.

Of course, Tea Party members will also remember Jealous most for his 2010 speech when he angrily demanded that the Tea Party expel its “bigots and racists,” as the NAACP passed a resolution condemning the Tea Party as racist.

My message to the Tea Party is this: you must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions. We will no longer allow you to hide like cowards behind signs that say, “lynch our President” or anyone else.

During his speech, Jealous had also cited in part as proof of the so-called racism the phantom N-word incident that supposedly occurred outside the Capitol steps in DC at the height of the health care debate.  This despite the fact numerous videos surfaced that showed no signs of truth to claims of use of the n-word and intentional spitting on a congressman.  As more began to question the validity of the accusations, even some of the MSM began to back away from such strong charges and tried to change the direction of the narrative.

Jealous and his NAACP followed with a campaign to further smear the Tea Party as racist when it teamed with other left wing groups to launch TeaPartyTracker.org, a campaign based on the same model as Southern Poverty Law Center’s HateWatch blog.  It was a short lived one, as Professor Jacobson noted at the time:

As I noted when TeaPartyTrack[er].org was formed, the purpose never really was to monitor the Tea Party movement.  The public relations blitz regarding the formation of the website was what mattered in the run-up to the November elections.  Merely forming such a website was the point, so as to create the appearance that Tea Parties needed monitoring, and to draw attention away from the Glenn Beck rally in Washington.

Once the Democrats took a shellacking in November, TeaPartyTracker.org served no useful purpose.

And then of course there was the attack on Senator Tim Scott, a black Republican from South Carolina, in which Jealous accused Scott of not supporting civil rights.  Scott responded with class, and instead talked about how to unite the country.  The transparent attack seemed more about Scott’s history of standing up to the NAACP’s attempts to demonize the Tea Party.

Ben Jealous may have grown the rosters at NAACP during his tenure, but for many others, he leaves behind years of divisive rhetoric.

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