WASHINGTON (AP) - In its first 100 years, the most prominent civil rights group in the United States focused on achieving equality between blacks and whites.

But as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People celebrates that milestone anniversary, its newest and youngest leader ever says the organization must shift its mission from civil rights to attaining human rights for all.

“Same schools are a civil right,” NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said Tuesday in an interview with The Associated Press, discussing the Supreme Court's 1954 decision striking down segregation in public schools. “Good schools are a human right.”

While there are no laws now to keep blacks and whites from learning in the same classrooms, the quality of the schools many black pupils attend today often doesn't compare to the schools where many whites learn, due to neighborhood differences.

Not only good schools. But good health care and good jobs, too.

“Our agenda as we head into our second century as a civil rights organization is also to revive our legacy as a human rights organization,” Jealous said.

Jealous, 35, also said he intends to hold Barack Obama accountable for his promises on civil rights, regardless of Obama's status as the first black president.

“The president being black gives us no advantage,” said Jealous, who took over in September, adding that Obama's background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer may make him more receptive to the NAACP's agenda.

Jealous outlined several issues for Obama to address his first year in office: ensuring fair distribution of federal bailout funds, programs and contracts; reducing double-digit black unemployment; dealing with lenders who push minorities with good credit into subprime mortgages; reducing the disparity between unsolved homicides in minority and white communities; and ensuring that minority children have access to good schools.

The group also has prepared a list of judges, from the federal bench down to the local level, for consideration when vacancies arise.

NAACP chapters are investigating deaths in police custody in at least five states, Jealous added.

Questions have been raised for years about the NAACP's relevancy and the need for such an organization in a time when blacks have made progress on several fronts, including in corporate boardrooms, sports, Hollywood and now the White House.

Jealous said he expects “the traditional relationship” between presidents and the nation's oldest civil rights organization: “We will be the people at the end of the day who help make him do what he knows he should do.”

“If he aspires to be the next Abraham Lincoln, I aspire to be his Frederick Douglass,” Jealous said, referring to the slave-turned-abolitionist who pressed a cautious Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Jealous said he has not met with Obama since becoming NAACP president, but enjoys “a very fluid, high-level relationship” with some of Obama's aides and advisers.

The lifelong activist and organizer warned that NAACP members today are not satisfied with simply having a black president.

“What they want to know is: 'What problem in my life will he be solving? Dad's out of work, Mom's not getting paid enough, the kids' school is an embarrassment. What is he doing for me?”

By Darlene Superville

Associated Press Writer