Benjamin Todd Jealous (born January 18, 1973) is an American political activist. He served as the president and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 2008 to 2013.

Jealous was the Democratic nominee in the 2018 Maryland gubernatorial election, losing to the incumbent Republican governor Larry Hogan.

Jealous then served as president of People for the American Way from 2020 to 2022. In November 2022, he was named executive director of the Sierra Club. He led the Sierra Club from January 2023 until his termination in August 2025.

Jealous was born in 1973 in Pacific Grove, California, and grew up on the Monterey Peninsula. His mother, Ann Jealous (née Todd), is biracial. She worked as a psychotherapist and had grown up in Baltimore. She had participated there in the desegregation of Western High School. She is the author, with Caroline Haskell, of Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism (2013). His father, Fred Jealous, who is white, is descended from settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, related to businessman Joseph B. Sargent, and directly in line to inherit the fortune from the Sargent and Co business. He founded the Breakthrough Men's Community and participated in Baltimore sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters. Jealous's parents met in Baltimore in 1966. At the time, they did not openly date each other in public; when they went to the movies, they took separate paths to adjacent seats to hide their relationship. As an interracial couple, they were prohibited by state law from marrying in Maryland before 1967. They married in Washington, D.C., and returned to live in Baltimore for a time before moving to California in the early-1970s. As a child, Jealous was sent to Baltimore to spend his summers with his maternal grandparents, who lived in the Ashburton neighborhood. Jealous graduated from York School in Monterey, California in 1990.

Jealous's father was best friends with comedian Dave Chappelle's father, William David Chappelle III; as a result, Jealous has been friends with Dave Chappelle since childhood, and the two are god-brothers.

Jealous earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Columbia University. A Rhodes Scholar, he later earned a Master of Science in comparative social research from St Antony's College, Oxford.

At Columbia University, Jealous began working as an organizer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. As a student, he protested the university's plan to turn the Audubon Ballroom (the site of Malcolm X's assassination) into a research facility and was suspended. During his suspension, Jealous traveled through the South. During this time Mississippi's three black colleges were slated to be closed because of financial difficulties. Jealous organized with the local NAACP chapter to keep them fully funded and maintain their operations.

While in Mississippi, Jealous began working as a reporter for Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest historically black newspaper, under the tutelage of publisher Charles Tisdale. He eventually became its managing editor. His reporting was credited with exposing corruption among high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman. In addition, he helped acquit a small farmer who had been wrongfully accused of arson. Jealous returned to Columbia in 1997, where he applied for and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.