Ben Jealous
Ben Jealous reflects on the personal toll of leadership, how to connect with communities, and what his deep American roots reveal about our shared humanity. He is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and the author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing.
Transcript
Ben Jealous:
And so that was the game he ran on President Roosevelt. "Oh, you want to go camping? I'll take you to someplace that was so beautiful with its 4,000 foot granite cliffs and all of that, that you won't be the same dude three days later." And John's point was simple, which was there's some places in nature that are so beautiful. Why would you ever touch it? Just let it be itself.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today stands at the crossroads of two great American causes: the fight for justice and the defense of nature. Ben Jealous is the executive director of the Sierra Club, the former president of the NAACP and the author of Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing. In this conversation, we talk about what it takes to lead in turbulent times, the weight of history, the cost of courage, and the enduring promise of common purpose. Ben reminds us that the forest, rivers, and open skies are not the inheritance of one group, but the shared birthright of all Americans. It's a frank, wide-ranging, and ultimately hopeful discussion about the duties of citizenship and the moral fight to protect both people and planet. Let's get into it.
So Ben, in kind of preparing for this podcast, I realized that there were so many themes to explore with you. You've lived such an amazing life. You're probably the only person to have been the head of the NAACP and the head of the Sierra Club. How do those two things fit together?
Ben Jealous:
I may be the only person ever in history to have led both groups because these are jobs that kill you. So at 35, I became head of the Sierra Club and when I was 37, I had an existential crisis because I went through every NAACP president that I knew the life story of. And so that starts with Walter White, who becomes president in his late thirties in the 1930s, dies of a heart attack in the early 1950s while still leading the naacp. And from that point to me, that job had either done irreversible harm to the health of the CEO or to their reputation or both. And I was just like, what am I doing? And I went to a mentor and I was like, this job, it's a killing job. And my mentor said, so what you're saying is that you want a plan, like an exit plan. You want to know how the story ends and what you do after. And I was like, yeah. He's like, have you ever had a plan? I was like, no. He was like, how's that been working for you so far? I said, pretty good. He said, so why would you want to mess up your secret formula right now?
And I was like, I guess you're right, boss. So yeah, it's been a wild ride so far.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What is it about that role that's so detrimental to your health? I mean obviously the subject matter is a challenge, but is there something more to it that makes it such a challenging role to have?
Ben Jealous:
It's two things. You're traveling everywhere, tending to a flock of 2,400 chapters, so you are all through all the country all the time, but what really I think makes it hard is the amount of trauma that you're dealing with without warning all the time.
The relationship between the police and the Black community means that it often heats up in the summer, so it always ruins any vacation you had planned. And it does so ruthlessly without warning. I remember one week I came home to my then-wife, thought I was going to have a week at home to focus on my health, go to some doctor's appointments, focus on my marriage, be present, do the chores, all the things, and I get a call from the head of the Florida state chapter of the NAACP and she says, "Ben, I need you in Sanford, Florida today, they still haven't charged George Zimmerman. The white supremacists are here to defend the white community. The Black nationalists are here to defend the Black community. Thousands of people are gathering and I'm afraid the whole thing could blow." And I always kept a packed suitcase and I went to my wife, and I said, I'm sorry again, I got to go.
I'm hoping to be back tomorrow. I was in Sanford for 10 days. That night we had a mass meeting of 2,000 people. We had to send another 50 people to try to divert a march that appeared to be headed to the police station to cause violence and mayhem. And the good news is, a year and a half later when the verdict came down, we weren't worried about Sanford, Florida anymore. We had done so much work with the Republican mayor, the Democratic city manager, one white, one Black. That city had actually pulled tighter together and the FBI Community Relations Service really had no concern that whatever the verdict was, there would be any problems in Sanford. But the smartest thing I ever did, brother, was decide at 41 that I had to step down from that job. I stepped down from the NAACP, I said I was stepping down to spend more time with my family, which was code for "save my marriage," and the other, I was a walking heart attack.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It sounds like you learned some lessons around how to manage your life, but in joining the Sierra Club, I hope you took some quality of life lessons as well with you because that is an extremely complicated job as well. Were there any lessons from the NAACP that are applicable, that you use, that you draw on as the head of the Sierra Club?
Ben Jealous:
Yeah, I think the number one lesson is not actually a life lesson, it's a lesson on why the NAACP runs so well, which is train, train, train. Civil servants understand the value of relationships, knowing each other, meeting together to foster those relationships, and then training all the time. And it really allows you to have great confidence in that role that certain things—Sierra Club, on the other hand, has had precisely one national convention in 133 years. But as far as surviving it, yeah, a few things. I mean, one of them is to really be conscious, not just of the impact your work's having on your kids—which I was always conscious of—but that it's really having on your life partner. And it's just easier to put your love for somebody else in a bottle in your pocket and be like, "when I just get out of this tunnel, when I get out of this excruciating job, when I get out of the cauldron that is parenting, we'll just open this bottle back up and it'll be well preserved." And then one day you realize that actually that the bottle broke in your pocket. And so yeah, this time around it's less a barbell, it's more a triangle. It's about my relationships to my kids, it's about maintaining my physical self and it's also about my relationship to all the other people that I love: my partner, my family, my friends, and just trying to show up regularly in the right way in those relationships, because it's the source of so much resilience in leadership.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm struck by a thread in your life is you lean on optimism or you come off as extremely optimistic. And the two roles that we've talked about that you've taken—the head of the NAACP and the Sierra Club—there are enormous communities of people that are putting a huge amount of emotional weight on you as leaders of those organizations. And I'm wondering how you are able to continually return to optimism in that environment so successfully, because I think that's something that could really help this nation.
Ben Jealous:
Something that we share is we come from old American families. My father's family's been in this country for 401 years. He descends from the junior of the two partners in co-founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And my mom is a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson's grandmother via his first cousin, Richard Bland, who was his mentor in politics and in life. That's my fifth great grandfather. And when you grow up with grandmothers from families like that... on the white side, they talked about the American Revolution like it was six months ago, and on my mom's side they talk about the Civil War like it was two months ago. So all this history has have happened in the last year when you're, like, five years old— you're talking about the Revolution, talking about the Civil War, and what it teaches you to do is to look at history in decades and centuries and not months and years... And that really allows you to chill out a bit. I look at my son and he comes home from school the other day and he says, this classmate, their mother's Egyptian, and if Trump comes in, they're going to move to Egypt. Well, they asked me what I'm going to do and I said, well, we're as American as you get without being Native American. He said, but what do I tell 'em? What are we going to do? I said, you tell 'em, our family survived the French Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement. We fight back, son, you just tell them that. You know? We're not going anywhere.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You are the descendant of both slaves and slave holders, which is one framing you didn't use in describing that. And I heard an interviewer at one point describe that as you being representative of the fault lines of America and your immediate response was, but it's also the ability to heal. I'm curious if you can say more about that.
Ben Jealous:
I think it's a little easier now for Black Americans to be curious about their white ancestors on the Black side of their family. I was down in Gloucester, Virginia, which 300 years before Martin Luther King's march on Washington, Gloucester was the site of the first documented rebellion in what became the lower 48 states. Essentially, an edict could come down from the king that said, "and your status shall convey to your children." That was a big deal because back then, slavery was pretty porous as far as trapping humans in it forever. And I was in that community and I was talking to the town historian, and there is a Civil War dead memorial outside, which is very different than a Civil War monument. This wasn't celebrating the heroism, it was honoring the dead. And I said to the town historian, is there any controversy about this? And he says, you know what's interesting? In the last 10 years, more and more Black Virginians come here to thank me, because they've gotten onto ancestry.com and they've gotten into the family tree and they've done their DNA and they figure out out who they descend from and the only record of that Civil War soldier that they can find is on that monument. And they're just happy there's a place they can come and look at the name of an ancestor.
Well, I was told when I was in college taking Psych 101 that it takes about four generations for massive trauma to pass through a family. And so it's been a similar number generations since slavery. Like, my grandmother's grandparents were the last born into slavery, but before my kids, that is their great-great-great-grandparents. And they're just curious, like, who were we related to in Virginia? It turns out like, most of the state who's been there for a long time. We're far enough away that I think people are more curious than anything about who they share DNA with, who are they connected to, and what can you learn about yourself or where you come from from them. At the end of the day, humanity is all one family. America, especially for those of us whose families have gone back forever, we're just much more intimately connected than we often realize. And there's a lot of good can be gained from that.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think it's a really powerful message, just how interwoven we are despite the sometimes efforts to highlight differences that exist. But I wonder what you say, and you touched on it just at the end there, but what you say to people that don't have that legacy, don't have that heritage in this country that feel very much a part of this country. And as you know as well as anyone, recent immigrants often are the biggest defenders of the nation and the biggest patriots. How do you communicate with them when they don't have that family heritage?
Ben Jealous:
So there's two things, right? I mean first of all, just—you should recognize yourself. You're looking at another human being. The only real question is: are you guys cousins 250 years ago, 500 years ago, a thousand years ago or 5,000 years ago? But the other thing is to really own what it means, when you're an old American, what it means of your family's legacy of that tradition is relevant to America today. And the most important one is we became Americans, our families, the day our families decided to come here. I was with Alec Baldwin. It appears that we're cousins in 16th century England and maybe in New England. I descend from—there's Baldwin's in multiple parts of my family tree.
Ted Roosevelt V:
How much time are you spending on ancestry.com? I mean, it feels like you've identified everybody.
Ben Jealous:
It's funny, the Black side was like, a decade of my life. It was so hard because slave records and stuff, they're all interrupted. And the white side? Man, I got a bottle of whiskey and stayed up till 5:00 AM and I was back at year zero because Roman records are so solid, right? You're just running down family trees. But then I was on Finding Your Roots and Henry Gates gave me a really beautiful family tree and that one has a bunch of Baldwins in it. And so I was talking to Alec and we were trying to figure out where exactly we might overlap, but it's clear we both descend from a bunch of Baldwins and he said, you know, Ben, I'm an old American like you and what that means is—and my people didn't show up with papers. You know, they didn't come through Ellis Island. They invaded somebody else's country as part of a movement defined by an idea, and you were an American the day you decided to leave the old world and come to the new world.
People who would then convert that into some fascist notion that somehow blood or religion defines your nation other than just deciding that, "I am going to live in these borders and I'm going to believe in the ideal that unites the people of every faith, of every color within these borders." And that's I think fundamentally what as an old American you have to give is a humility that says, yeah, we showed up here vulnerable too. And a conviction that says, this nation is about this— freedom—is about this—innovation—is about this—equality—and if you're down for that and you want to live here, then we are down for you because this is how we renew ourselves as a nation.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I love that answer in part because—I don't know how many of these podcasts we've done, but—one of the themes that we've tried to explore is what are the shared values? What is the connective tissue in this country today that people can look towards? When I was growing up, it was sort of clearer to me and now it feels like it's been harder to find, but the one that you just described feels durable.
I'm curious because I want to talk about your book, which is one of the best titles of any book I've ever come across: Never Forget Our People Were Always Free. But you said the reason you wrote the book was out of an urgent need to reaffirm your own belief that we can hold our nation together and avoid a second Civil War. I'm presuming from that comment that there was a point in time where you, too, doubted the cohesive nature of this nation. What did you find in writing the book that led you back to believing that we have more cohesive tissue than not?
Ben Jealous:
What I ran into in Sierra Club is that partisanship is really ingrained in the organization, as it is in American culture, in a profound way that we've got to find a way to break that wall down because there's just some things we need to agree on. As a nation, we've got to really get back to seeing ourselves as environmentalists again. When you and I were young, 80% of America in the late 1980s saw themselves as environmentalists. Now it's under 40%. As I age, I'm increasingly less partisan. I think what's really most important to me, again going back to just being raised by grandparents who were raised by grandparents, who were raised by grandparents who were, at the end of the day, optimistic about what was possible in these borders that define the United States. What's most important to me is that we find a way to hold it together.
And I'll tell you, Ted, the best way I know to do that—it's funny and it comes from being Black. When you're raised Black in this country, you quickly figure out that you're expected to be bi-cultural, that there's a way that we speak. There's a king's English, and it's defined by basically educated white Americans who define the business culture and the political culture of the country. And then there's a dialect. And that dialect, by the way, look, I mean, this can be Yiddish, the Jewish community, right? It can be kind of an Italian English, and it's also Black English, and you've got to speak both. If you're from one of those ethnic groups, you got to be able to go back and forth. And you're from New York, you might speak all of 'em. I mean, you might be in Harlem saying oy vey, right? But with social media, we all became bicultural. We all live in two worlds at once. You live in the world defined by the screen oftentimes in your hands or 24-hour news on the wall, and you live in the world in which your feet are planted.
And so I spend as much time as I can in the world in which my feet are planted. I turn off all the 24-hour news and I consume media like it's 1987. I watch the news hour, I read the newspaper, I listen to NPR or I listen to sports, but I stay away from the people who want to scream at me and try to convert me to their political cult because that really messes with my ability to connect with my neighbors. And that's the most important thing if we want to prevent a civil war.
Ted Roosevelt V:
How do you marry those two challenges of being nonpartisan, living in the world, the real world as opposed to the screen world, and still navigate and presumably push back on very real challenges to the objectives of the Sierra Club?
Ben Jealous:
It's still multifaceted. I mean, the easy answer is: look, we're in court and we're suing and a lot of this violates laws, and we proved in the last Trump administration, I think we filed on 300 lawsuits, we won well over 200 of those lawsuits. And we're doing the same thing again. The Sierra Club, we've shut down more than 380 coal-fire power plants around the country. But the most important thing is to really go to the American people and set aside everything that you learned in college about how to communicate. The jargon, the multi-syllabic words, the scientific-based arguments that require algebra to understand—and just boil it down to third-grade English and the things that are really important. And the things that are really important to Americans relate to the economy, health, and education. When you talk about health, you talk about, it shouldn't be this hard to breathe. That coal-fire power plant that they're cranking up? Let's be honest with you: what that means is they're comfortable with killing more of your neighbors. It's just a scientific fact. It's just mathematical, that if more coal is burned, more pollution comes out, more of our neighbors die.
And now people start to turn on because you talk about climate change. Well, that's 10 years away, it's a hundred years away, it's whatever. But if you say no, it's going to be more poisonous to eat the fish, it's going to be harder to breathe, more neighbors are going to die. Well, now I got to focus on that right now. And so that's where you got to keep the conversation. You got to keep it to the things that really matter to people in the short term. And that's jobs, and its health, and its education.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I think that's generally true, but it's worth noting that quite a few House members and senators voted for the recent budget reconciliation bill and that bill gutted many of the Inflation Reduction Act's key tax provisions. It's going to kill a lot of clean energy jobs, particularly in red districts, which currently receive about 80% of the IRA's economic benefits right now. And yet that didn't seem to sway the vote. Political identity appeared to outweigh the economic interests of their own constituents. And that frankly surprised me a little bit. Do you think we've reached a point where ideology is becoming the dominant force in Washington, even over jobs and local impact?
Ben Jealous:
It is in Washington. It's not in the world in which our feet are planted.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Yeah. Yeah.
Ben Jealous:
And so the important thing is to really organize neighbors. You know, the Sierra Club, we're in hundreds of communities across the country. We get a lot of Trump supporters signing our petitions because what we're talking about is about the air, is about the water, is about the local park, and somebody might hunt in that park and somebody else might hike in that park and somebody else may play baseball at the edge of it. But for whatever reason that park is valuable to them, it's valuable to them. And that's where it's got to be really face-to-face. It's got to be in the local community. It's got to be about that community, and it's got to be about things that have real concrete value to all of us right now. Right now, yet again, they are trying to auction off our public lands, right? We've got a developer as president and he's never seen a piece of land that doesn't have a building on it that he doesn't want to put a building on. And this is a big part of your family legacy. It's how we're kind of connected, through the Sierra Club. President Roosevelt, Teddy, wrote to a dude who was on the spectrum and a little bit off his rocker named John Muir, and he's like, "I love your books. Why don't you take me camping?" And John, said, "cool, bro, why don't you come with me to where I used to work in a sawmill." and John used to work in a sawmill in a valley, the name roughly translates to "man-killers."
And he took President Teddy Roosevelt camping and that camping trip led to the creation of Yosemite Valley National Park. That's what Yosemite means. And the creation of the entire national park system, and so that was the game he ran on President Roosevelt: "oh, you want to go camping? I'll take you to someplace that was so beautiful with its 4,000 foot granite cliffs and all of that, that you won't be the same dude three days later." And John's point was simple, which was, there's some places in nature that are so beautiful, why would you ever touch it? Just let it be itself. And that's how we at Sierra Club created the preservation wing of the conservation movement. Now we've got Congresspeople who want to auction off our national parklands, and it really does—you and I were talking about what it means to be an American.
It strikes at the essence of what it means to be an American. And the Sierra Club these days we talk about, the President may try to take away our nonprofit status, and I'm grateful to everybody who gives and who leans in and helps us maintain our tradition and our organization. The last time that they tried to take away Sierra Club's nonprofit status was in the late 1960s when we stopped the effort to turn the Grand Canyon into a reservoir. Imagine America without the Grand Canyon, just a big reservoir for Los Angeles. And then imagine what would happen if we were like, oops, we made a mistake and we drained it. It would just be this nasty mud pit with all of those beautiful formations gone. In Europe, they've always preserved the best land for kings. In America, this nation where we believe that the very idea of a king violates the fundamental rights which God granted to all of us, we've always preserved the best land for the people. And the notion that any president thinks he can rob the American people of their birthright is an anathema to the notion of America itself.
Ted Roosevelt V:
With that sentiment, I'm going to ask you the final question which we ask everybody, which is: what does it mean to be a good citizen?
Ben Jealous:
My uncle, who works in a lumberyard at 75 years old, doesn't think he'll ever be able to afford to retire, up there in northern New England where our family's been for so long...My uncle taught me how to use a chainsaw, how to use a shotgun. He was my hero when I was a kid. He was the captain of the local volunteer search and rescue in Fryberg, Maine. He spent his life on the rivers, he spent his life in the mountains, he spent his life on the highways, saving lives. And then one day he stepped down as the captain to the local fire and search and rescue and let one of his other neighbors do it. And I said, why'd you do it and why'd you step down? And he said, this is what it means to be a citizen, son.
So we all live in a community, we need to serve it. He said, but you don't serve forever and not in the same position. At the end of the day, somebody else deserves to have the opportunity to lead the team too. And that's what it means to me to be a citizen. You really put your faith in your neighbors, you invest love in your neighbors, you accept your responsibility to care for your neighbors. And you train them to be leaders, and then you let them lead too. And you're humble enough to say, "well, I didn't lead the way that they would lead, and they won't lead the way that I will lead." But it all adds up to a greater good if we can just hold it together.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Ben, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this conversation. If you are ever up in New York, please let me know. I'd love to chat face-to-face.
Ben Jealous:
I would love that. I would love that. And I got to say, man, I've met a few of your cousins and the family tradition is strong. Thank you for being a part of that.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Ben Jealous:
Alright, brother.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you, Ben, for such a genuine, open conversation with so many great insights from your life and powerful reflections for our country's future. Listeners, please grab a copy of Ben's book: Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing. It's a fabulous book, and it's a stirring collection of stories that will stay with you long after you've finished. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.