Cornell Brooks, new president of NAACP, is a relative unknown but has deep civil rights background - baltimoresun.com: He'd been leader of a New Jersey social justice organization since 2008, making inroads on housing and employment issues, when Cornell Brooks, a soft-spoken lawyer and minister, got an opportunity he didn't see coming.
The NAACP, a national organization based in Northwest Baltimore, was looking for a new president. A search committee wanted to talk. He had to decide whether to seek the job as successor to the charming, sometimes controversial Ben Jealous. A friend remembers telling the 53-year-old Brooks that it might be hard to handle the competing factions within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which has a famously unwieldy 64-person board, hundreds of local branches and periodic financial problems.
