The local NAACP asked Ben Jealous, Sierra Club’s national leader, if he was willing to acquiesce to Chevron. He said no.

Pam Marino here, reporting on a tangled web of relationships involving a hometown son turned national leader, a respected local civil rights organization and a major oil corporation with an agenda that runs counter to the best interests of communities of color.

The hometown son is Ben Jealous, a fifth-generation NAACP member, son of civil rights activists Fred and Ann Jealous, the former head of the national NAACP and current executive director of the national Sierra Club.

Jealous was set to be the keynote speaker on Saturday, Sept. 21 at the local NAACP’s 52nd Annual Life Membership Banquet at the Embassy Suites in Seaside, which, given his background in the chapter and his past leadership of the NAACP at the national level, makes sense.

That is, until local NAACP leaders asked Jealous to censor his remarks and “‘not voice a point of view that might make Chevron uncomfortable,’” as Jealous quoted in a letter he sent last night to President Lyndon Tarver and other leaders of the branch, and shared with the Weekly. 

It was a request he had to refuse, he says.

Jealous wrote in the letter how thrilled he was to initially be invited. “You can imagine how heartbroken I was to have that invitation revoked in order to protect the comfort of the event’s sponsor—Chevron.” 

“I was stunned and I was hurt,” Jealous says. “I grew up in this branch. I was trained by leaders in this branch. I have been very supportive of the branch for many years. This is home. This is family.

“I was stunned they would disinvite any past [NAACP] leader, any civil rights leader in favor of an oil company, over their homeboy,” he says.

He also told the leaders that his own mentor, “the revered former national chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, would roll over in his grave if I yielded to such a request.” Bond, he said, was proud to join Jealous in launching a climate action program as Jealous’ first act as the national NAACP president.

Jealous says the national NAACP has a history of returning the checks of major corporations—he specifically points to the organization returning money in the 1990s to Philip Morris, the tobacco giant that historically targeted Black consumers. He likens what Philip Morris was doing to Black communities to what Chevron is doing to communities of color today.

“The local NAACP should return Chevron’s check. It’s blood money,” Jealous says. 

In the letter, he called the chapter taking Chevron’s money a “dangerous precedent,” and said the “real danger…is demonstrated by what the fossil fuel industry has done to Black communities across this country” through air and water pollution.

He also pointed out that at the time Chevron became a sponsor of Saturday’s banquet, Big Oil was getting ready to put a ballot initiative before California voters that would weaken a new law that protects communities from nearby wells. The measure was pulled in June, Jealous said, when its backers realized they couldn’t win.

Most of the wells in question are located in Southern California, but Jealous draws a comparison to Monterey County’s Measure Z, which voters here passed in a landslide in 2016. Oil companies fought the ordinance in court and eventually won. (Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, was able to get a bill passed that would establish local control over oil activities; the bill still sits on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.)

Simultaneous to the court fight, Chevron was giving millions of dollars in donations to nearly 40 organizations in Monterey County, including the NAACP, according to its website. It also touts having donated $200,000 to STEM education and has donated to Hartnell College, the Monterey County Office of Education and many other schools and educational organizations.

“For chapters and branches to accept fossil fuel blood money and then oppose clean energy initiatives—or insist their event honorees and speakers not cause ‘discomfort’ to the industry that is killing our planet and people—is a betrayal of the entire mission of the NAACP,” Jealous wrote, adding it was also a betrayal of the NAACP’s brand.

(Chevron’s activity with the local branch runs deeper—its representative in Monterey County from 2018 until just a couple of months ago was Andrea Bailey, a Black woman who served on a multitude of boards and committees around the county, including the executive committee of the Monterey County chapter of the NAACP.)

“Black people are among the most acutely harmed by the climate crisis,” Jealous wrote in the letter. “For the NAACP to accept money and influence from the very perpetrators of that crisis makes a mockery of its more-than-a-century-old mission to secure our advancement…the Monterey County Branch should return Chevron’s check immediately.”

I reached out to NAACP President Tarver for comment and did not hear back by deadline. I also reached out to Chevron and did not receive a response. Jealous has spoken, and he will not appear at Saturday’s event.

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