Moving into the Mainstream

By Richard N. Ostling

A progressive leader for the nation's largest black church group

The stalwarts of the civil rights movement were there. Coretta Scott King, evoking her husband's memory; Atlanta Patriarch Benjamin Mays, delivering a soul-stirring speech from a wheelchair; and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, still undecided about when, or if, he will announce his candidacy for President. Comedian Dick Gregory exhorted the huge audience: "You're the strongest, biggest, blackest organization there is. Use it!"

The scene at the Los Angeles Convention Center last week was the annual assembly of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. (N.B.C.U.S.A.), a black organization that claims 6.8 million* members and is the nation's third largest Protestant denomination. The 35,000 delegates knew that history would be made. Although Martin Luther King was once a member, the N.B.C.U.S.A. had been so conservative on political and social issues that the organization took no active role in the civil rights protest movement.

As delegates cheered the speeches, the man responsible for keeping N.B.C.U.S.A. aloof from the 1960s demonstrations sat impassively on the platform, ignoring both the rhetoric and the reaction. In September 1982, after a reign of 29 years, the Rev. Joseph H. Jackson had been deposed as president of N.B.C.U.S.A. Jackson's long rule was criticized last week by the man who replaced him in office: the Rev. T.J. (for Theodore Judson) Jemison, 63, who also told the gathering, "We must permit our convention to become program-centered rather than personality-centered. We must be ready to step aside and let others take our place." Jemison went on to thunder, "When you're leading people, you can't lead without civil rights. Brothers and sisters, we are moving into the mainstream!"

Jackson was elected president of N.B.C.U.S.A. in 1953, succeeding Jemison's blind and aged father D.V. Jemison, a pastor in Mobile, Ala. As the civil rights revolution began, Jackson hailed the use of lawsuits, but he steadfastly opposed mass protests and the civil disobedience campaigns favored by King and his followers. Jackson's critics say that he envied King's growing fame; his sympathizers say that he was morally offended by disobedience to the law. As Jackson complained in 1982, in what turned out to be his last presidential address, "Many of our young people have been left with the notion that the highest values within the political and economic struggle can be attained primarily through protest, pickets, boycotts and civil disobedience. I admit with you that it is better to react peacefully against the evil forces of our system than to seek to attain by force and violence the rights to which we are entitled."

In 1961, after King and other insurgents failed to unseat Jackson, they led 500,000 blacks out of the organization and formed the Progressive National Baptist Convention. The majority of black Baptist churches and minister stayed with N.B.C.U.S.A. out of loyalty to their denomination. Nonetheless, since Baptist congregations are autonomous thousands of N.B.C.U.S.A. churches simply ignored Jackson's preachments and supported King's struggle.

The 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.

But 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 to step down. When Jackson refused to quit, despite growing criticism of his autocratic, old-fashioned ways, Jemison finally mounted a campaign against him in 1982.

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 to head.

-- By Richard N. Ostling.

Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

* However, the denomination has no hard data, and the standard Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches still uses a 1958 estimate of 5.5 million.

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