Word: jemison
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...last month, is finding that a run at the presidency cannot be fueled by ego and limelight alone. Clergymen this summer optimistically promised that $10 million could be raised for Jackson from the nation's network of black churches. But that plan was opposed by the Rev. T.J. Jemison, leader of the powerful National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., who opposes mixing politics and religion. So Jackson's fledgling advisory committee has been reduced to sending out 2,000 solicitation letters, using a slapdash mailing list of friends and black businessmen, to raise seed money. Consequently, prominent politicians like...
...dispute between King and Jackson was an awkward one for T.J. Jemison. As Coretta King informed the roaring crowd in Los Angeles last week, her late husband had sought Jemison's counsel before launching the famous Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and with good reason Two and a half years earlier, Jemison, as the young pastor of Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, La., had organized the nation's first bus boycott. His campaign forced the city to integrate seating in its transportation system in just eight days...
...Jemison also had ties with Jackson. In 1953, when Jackson was elected president, Jemison had been chosen general secretary, and year after year the two were re-elected in tandem. Privately, Jemison was not happy with the group's aloof stance toward the civil rights movement. "It was very difficult," he admitted last week. "I sat through it out of loyalty to the leadership. All I could do then was sit and cry within." Jemison, whose dying father had told him that "God would pass the leadership of the convention to me," bided his time, waiting for Jackson...
...Jemison, who remains as pastor of the Mount Zion Church, is trying hard to tap the vast potential of his large but loosely organized and ill-financed denomination. He is moving younger men into key positions and offering women a bigger role. Jemison has dispatched full delegations for the first time in years to meetings of the National and World Councils of Churches. He also hopes to rouse the 26,000 local congregations, concentrated in the South, into mounting an evangelistic crusade to win 3 million new adherents. Not so incidentally, they would also be registered as voters...
...Jemison's spirit of social activism does not extend to endorsing Jesse Jackson if he should decide to run for President. Jackson is nonetheless enthusiastic about the Jemison administration, calling it the "dawn of a new era." He notes that N.B.C.U.S.A. is not only the nation's largest black organization but a highly independent one as well. "This group could be the key force in political change in 1984 and beyond," declares Jackson. It remains to be seen whether Jemison will be able to galvanize the latent strength, political and spiritual, of the organization he waited so long...