BALTIMORE — On a recent Saturday, Benjamin Todd Jealous was up early, getting ready for a full day of campaign stops. The former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was preparing to make the rounds — shoe leather pounding the pavement in neighborhoods — ahead of next month’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in Maryland.
But first, Jealous takes to the podium to rev up a group of union workers before hitting the trail.
“When we invite other people to join us, we win,” says Jealous to a wave of steady applause. “We are building a movement of working families across the state to make sure we fully fund our schools, to make sure all of us have health care and we can afford to use it.”
At 45, Jealous is looking to make history by becoming Maryland’s first Black governor, making access to higher education a central tenet of his grassroots campaign.
Jealous is no stranger to becoming a trailblazer.
Ten years ago, at the age of 35, Jealous was selected as the youngest person to lead the NAACP, the venerable civil rights organization founded in 1909.
Though this is Jealous’ first run for office, he appears at ease, returning to the skills that he developed many years ago as a community organizer who led campaigns to abolish the death penalty for children, stop a Mississippi governor from turning a public historically Black university into a prison and champion federal legislation against prison rape.
