| Benjamin Todd Jealous served as President of the Rosenberg
Foundation- a private independent institution that supports advocacy
efforts to make significant improvements in the lives of California's
working families and recent immigrants. He was the fourth person to
hold the position since the Foundation was founded in 1935.
Mr. Jealous was Director of US Human Rights Program at Amnesty
International. While there he led its efforts to pass federal legislation
against prison rape, rebuild public consensus against racial profiling
in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, and expose
the widespread sentencing of children to life without the possibility
of parole. He is the lead author of the 2004 report Threat and Humiliation:
Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United
States, the release of which received coverage by major media outlets
in most states and on six continents.
Formerly, Mr. Jealous served as Executive Director of the National
Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA)-a federation of more than
200 black community newspapers. While at the NNPA, he rebuilt its
90-year old national news service and spearheaded the creation of
a proprietary software system that enabled dozens of local papers
to begin publishing online.
During the mid 1990s, Mr. Jealous served as Managing Editor of
the Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest black newspaper. His
reporting for the frequently-firebombed weekly was credited with
exposing corruption amongst high-ranking officials at the state
prison in Parchman, and helping to acquit a small farmer who had
been wrongfully and maliciously accused of arson.
He initially came to Mississippi as a field organizer on a successful
campaign to stop the state's plan to close two of its three public
historically black universities, and convert one of them into a
prison.
Mr. Jealous began his career as an organizer with the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund working on issues of healthcare access.
He was born, raised, and attended public and parochial schools
in Monterey County, California. He holds a bachelor's degree in
political science from Columbia University and a master's degree
in comparative social research from Oxford University where he was
a Rhodes Scholar.
Mr. Jealous is a member of the Asia Society. He is a board member
of Northern California Grantmakers and the California Council for
the Humanities.
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