Is Ben Jealous What Progressives Want?
Ben Jealous, a tall, gregarious man wearing a suit, stepped to the center of the room at Morgan State University. The comedian Dave Chappelle, wearing stylishly torn clothes and clutching a cup of coffee, took a seat on a table to the left. Jealous launched into one of his favorite stories, punctuated by Chappelle’s occasional interjections—the time Chappelle saved his life.
It was the early ‘90s, and the former NAACP chief was then a young activist organizing protests against Mississippi Governor Kirk Fordice, who had threatened to call out the National Guard rather than comply with a court ruling to fund his state’s historically black colleges. Fordice had suggested closing one of them and turning it into a prison. Jealous had just picked up Chappelle, his godbrother, from the airport in Mississippi. Shortly after Chappelle told Jealous that he had a dime bag of marijuana in his luggage, they were pulled over by a pair of police officers in an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria.
A white officer emerged with a nickel-plated .45 in his hand—“That’s not standard issue!” Chappelle observed—and told them to get out of the car.
“They give us very complex orders for getting out of the vehicle without getting shot, we do all that because we don’t want to get shot,” Jealous said. Then the white officer asked him, “Boy, where have I seen you before?”
“I’m trying not to say, ‘Yeah, I’m the high-yellow guy with wavy hair on the news each night leading protests,’” Jealous recounted. Just before he could answer, the other officer, who was black, asked Chappelle, “Boy, didn’t I see you on Def Comedy Jam last night?”
The audience roared with laughter, but Jealous wasn’t done.
“I was terrified at that moment because we were two black men in America with a dime bag,” Jealous said.
