Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing

“One of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders” (Washington Post), a New York Times bestselling author, community organizer, investigative journalist, Ivy League professor, and former head of the NAACP, Ben Jealous draws from a life lived on America’s racial fault line to deliver a series of gripping and lively parables that call on each of us to reconcile, heal, and work fearlessly to make America one nation.

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free illuminates for each of us how the path to healing America’s broken heart starts with each of us having the courage to heal our own.The son of parents who had to leave Maryland because their cross-racial marriage was illegal, Ben Jealous’ lively, courageous and empathetic storytelling calls on every American to look past deeply-cut divisions and recognize we are all in the same boat now. Along the way Jealous grapples with hidden American mysteries, including:

• Why do white men die from suicide more often than black men die from murder?
• How did racial profiling kill an American president?
• What happens when a Ku Klux Klansman wrestles with what Jesus actually said? 
• How did Dave Chappelle know the DC Snipers were Black? 
• Why shouldn't the civil rights movement give up on rednecks?
• When is what we have collectively forgotten about race more important than what we actually know?
• What do the most indecipherable things our elders say tell us about ourselves?

 Told as a series of parables, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free features intimate glimpses of political, and faith leaders as different as Jack Kemp, Stacey Abrams, and the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu and heroes as unlikely as a retired constable, a female pirate from Madagascar, a long lost Irishman, a death row inmate, and a man with a confederate flag over his heart.

More than anything, Never Forget Our People Were Always Free offers readers hope America’s oldest wounds can heal and her oldest divisions be overcome.

“One of the nation’s most prominent civil rights leaders” (Washington Post), former national NAACP President Ben Jealous grew up the son of a white father who descends from seven soldiers in the American Revolution and a black mother whose American bloodline flows with that of Thomas Jefferson’s grandmother.

Ben Jealous is President of People For the American Way, Professor of the Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, and the New York Times bestselling author of Reach: 40 Black Men Speak on Living, Leading, and Succeeding. He is also a successful tech investor who has helped grow more than two dozen startups built to have a positive social impact.

Formerly an investigative reporter at Mississippi’s frequently-firebombed Jackson Advocate newspaper, and a popular speaker on college campuses and at community and business leadership events, Jealous is known both for his raucously insightful storytelling and resilient optimism passed down by a grandmother whose own grandfather had been born into slavery and went on to serve as a statesman in the Virginia legislature.

In 2013, the Baltimore Sun named Jealous Marylander of the Year for his work helping lead efforts that passed marriage equality, abolished the death penalty and passed the DREAM Act in that state in a single year. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is the proud father of a daughter and son. He lives with his family and their dog Charlie along the Chesapeake Bay.