Ben Jealous

Ben Jealous brings experience as a civil-rights leader, community organizer, journalist, and author to work connecting family history with public advocacy. Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing was published by Amistad in 2023. The book uses personal stories and encounters with political, religious, and community figures to consider how inherited memory can support reconciliation across racial and ideological divisions. Its title comes from a teaching passed through Jealous's family. Before writing the book, he served as a reporter and managing editor at the Jackson Advocate and later led the NAACP as its president and chief executive. He studied at Columbia University and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Jealous has also held roles in investment and environmental leadership, carrying questions of equity into several institutional settings. Never Forget Our People Were Always Free brings those strands together as a memoir-like series of parables grounded in relatives, mentors, organizing campaigns, and American history.