NAACP President and CEO to Deliver Pitt Law School Commencement Address May 15

PITTSBURGH-Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, will deliver the address for the University of Pittsburgh School of Law's 2009 commencement ceremony to be held at 3 p.m. May 15 in Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium and Museum, 4141 Fifth Ave., Oakland.

The University will confer 232 Juris Doctor degrees, 15 Master of Laws degrees, eight Master of Studies in Law degrees, and one Certificate in Disability Legal Studies, the first to be awarded since the program began in 2006. A reception will immediately follow the ceremony in the Cathedral of Learning Commons Room, 4200 Fifth Ave., Oakland.

Jealous is the 17th president and CEO of the NAACP and also the youngest person to hold the office in the organization's 100-year history. Prior to joining the NAACP, he served as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, a private independent institution that funds civil and human rights advocacy to benefit California's working families. Before that, he was director of the U.S. Human Rights Program at Amnesty International, where he led 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 also served as executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

As a student at Columbia University, Jealous worked in Harlem as a community organizer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. On campus, he led schoolwide movements, including boycotts and pickets for homeless rights; a successful campaign to save full-need financial and need-blind admissions, when other national universities were cutting such programs; and an environmental justice battle with Columbia. Before obtaining his degree, Jealous left Columbia and worked as a field organizer in Mississippi, where he helped lead a campaign that prevented the closing of two of Mississippi's three historically Black public universities and converting one of them into a prison.

Jealous took a job at the "Jackson Advocate," an African American newspaper based in Mississippi's capital. Through his reporting, Jealous was credited with exposing corruption among high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman. His work earned him a promotion to managing editor of the paper.

Jealous returned to Columbia University in 1997 and completed his degree in political science. He was named a Rhodes Scholars and earned a master's degree in comparative social research at Oxford University.

Active in civic life, Jealous is a board member of the California Council for the Humanities and the Association of Black Foundation Executives.

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5/14/09/tmw