Democracy Depends on Your Participation

Benjamin Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Mr. Jealous to respond to questions to provide context for his work and the causes he supports.

Change.org: What causes would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?

We are fighting for a better America where all children can go to a good school, where communities are safe and healthy, where people have jobs and make a living wage and where incarceration is not used as the treatment for social ills like mental illness and drug abuse.

It is said that when America catches cold, African Americans get pneumonia. Our communities tend to be disproportionately impacted by crime, joblessness and a broken health care system.

My goal is to promote criminal justice initiatives that put an end to mass incarceration, common sense employment programs that bring jobs back into communities, and health policies that protect the most vulnerable among us -- including those disproportionately affected by global climate change.

Change.org: If you could ask one million people to all do one thing to advance causes that matter to you, what would it be?

Raise your voice. Talk to your member of Congress, your local representatives, your school board. Be a player in helping to change our system. Democracy depends on your participation. It is so easy to throw your hands up and say that the powerful will always win, but cynicism doesn't accomplish anything. One advantage of leading the NAACP is the 100-year history I have to draw inspiration from. It is a history of people who refused to take no for an answer, and ended up changing the world.

Change.org: Tell us a bit about your personal story and how you came to care so much about these causes.

Growing up as one of only a handful of African-American kids in Monterrey, California, I was always deeply aware of the role of race in society. My white father was actually disowned by his parents when he married my black mother. When I was seven years old, I told them that I planned to be a civil rights attorney. When I was a teenager I was out with my family running voter registration drives.

In 1992 I was suspended from Columbia University after organizing a demonstration against the destruction of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was assassinated. The suspension was only for one semester, but I didn't come back for two more years. Instead I moved to Mississippi to fight the closures of two of the state’s three public historically black universities.

I believe deeply that human rights issues -- good schools, public health, addressing the alarming rates of incarceration in this country -- are the logical extension of the civil rights movement.

Change.org: What are the greatest obstacles to change on these causes?

Complacency. Yes, the insurance companies and the polluters and the multinationals and the prison industrial complex can be formidable opponents, but historically we have taken on tougher battles and won.

The NAACP has always embraced the impossible. One hundred years ago, we were a small multiracial group of progressives who dared to come together in a tiny New York apartment to share a bold dream: an America free of racial oppression. The organization launched a tenacious struggle to end the horror of lynch mobs. In 1932, we took up the mantle to reverse Jim Crow, and two decades later, segregation was made illegal. In the wake of Brown v Board, a determined effort for political inclusion was launched, triumphing last year in the election of an African-American president.

Our opponents have always been stronger than us, and the odds stacked against us, but through tenacity and hope, we have managed to redefine the possible.

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