A conversation with Benjamin Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP, and Rep. Donna Edwards; moderated by Alexis McGill Johnson.
Bio
Donna Edwards
Congresswoman Donna F. Edwards represents Maryland’s 4th Congressional District comprising portions of Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties. She was sworn in as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in June 2008, and began her first full-term in the 111th Congress in 2009.
Edwards is a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Science and Technology Committee. She also serves on the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Prior to serving in Congress, Rep. Edwards was the executive director of the Arca Foundation in Washington, D.C., where she worked on issues such as securing a “living wage” for working people, protecting social security, and promoting labor and human rights both nationally and internationally.
She was also the co-founder and executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, where she led the effort to pass The Violence Against Women Act of 1994 that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Benjamin Todd Jealous
As the 17th President and Chief Executive Officer of the NAACP, and the youngest person to hold the position in the organization’s nearly 100-year history, Benjamin Jealous has a deep commitment to social justice, public service and human rights activism. Jealous has served as President of the Rosenberg Foundation.
He was also 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 9/11, and expose the widespread sentencing of children to life imprisonment without parole. As the Executive Director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a federation of more than 200 black community newspapers, Jealous doubled the number of black newspapers publishing online.
Early in his career, Jealous reported for the Jackson Advocate, an African American newspaper based in Mississippi. His reporting was credited with exposing corruption amongst high-ranking officials at a state prison, and helping to acquit a small black farmer who had been wrongfully and maliciously accused of arson.
Alexis McGill Johnson
Alexis McGill Johnson is a political strategist, writer, and organizer. She was the Executive Director of Citizen Change, a national, nonpartisan, and nonprofit organization founded by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs to educate, motivate, and empower young eligible voters.
Under Combs, she launched the Vote or Die! campaign, creating a new political model for reaching young people and people of color by mixing traditional grassroots mobilization with nontraditional consumer-based marketing methods. Before joining Citizen Change, she was the Political Director to Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network.
Throughout her career, she has explored shifting paradigms of identity politics in the post-civil rights era, worked to increase civic engagement among young African Americans, and investigated the implications for demographic and ideological changes of this constituency on national politics. She serves as a private consultant to a variety of organizations, donors, and artists.
The claim that Jones' resignation was some kind of Neo-McCarthyite moment is laughable. The Jones tripped and fell on words he spoke and documents he signed. That data - particularly his endorsement of the Truther loons - put he well outside the bounds of civil discourse.
I consider myself an Obama Independent and I think I can say w/o party loyalty to shade my opinion that if a Republican equivalent of Van Jones had turned up in Republican admin he would be chased out of office just as relentlessly as Jones. And rightly so. We don't need people who are willing to indulge lunatic fantasies like the Truther movement on a public payroll and crowding the public conversation.
member. 
