The Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) announced that its inaugural Black History Month Lecture will feature one of the country’s major civil rights leaders, Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Color People (NAACP).

The title of his inaugural lecture is “Black History and American Democracy: Considerations for the Coming Decades.”  Jealous will offer a critical assessment of the interrelated and intertwined histories, current issues and obligations to the future that African Americans and all other Americans share in creating and sustaining a truly multicultural, just and good society.

The lecture will be held Thursday, Feb. 2, from noon to 1 p.m., in the University Student Union (USU) Ballroom at Cal State Long Beach.  The event is free and open to the public.

As president and CEO of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, Jealous became the youngest person to serve as its chief executive in 2008 at age 35.

Jealous has dedicated his life to fighting for freedom and justice.  He is an organizer and journalist whose work has been credited with helping: save a Black small farmer who was being framed for arson; expose our nation’s widespread sentencing of children to life without the possibility of parole; stop the state of Mississippi from turning a public historically Black university into a prison; and abolish the juvenile death penalty in the United States.

He formerly served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, director of Amnesty International’s U.S. Human Rights Program, executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, and managing editor of the Jackson Advocate, a crusading Black-owned Mississippi newspaper that was fire-bombed in 1998.

A fifth-generation member of the NAACP, Jealous’ family has been deeply involved in the ongoing struggle for freedom and justice in America.  His mother, who was one of a handful of Black girls to desegregate Baltimore’s Western High School in 1954, descends from men who were born slaves and died having served as Reconstruction statesmen in Virginia’s House of Delegates and Senate.  His father, who was jailed for his participation in lunch counter sit-ins, descends from a soldier who was promoted from corporal to lieutenant during the Battle of Bunker Hill.

A Rhodes Scholar, Jealous is a graduate of Columbia College, Oxford University, and the public and parochial schools of Monterey County.

The lecture will be followed by the 13th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration on Thursday, Feb. 9, from noon to 1 p.m. in CSULB’s USU.  The contact for this event is Valerie Bourdeaux, director, University Outreach and School Relations, who can be reached at 562/985-5358.