Dec. 1, 2013

Rev. T.J. Jemison, Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 95

Rev. T. J. Jemison

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from The Louisiana Weekly

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Rev. T. J. Jemison, a longtime Louisiana pastor, pioneering civil rights leader and founder of one of the nation’s met effective faith-based civil rights organizations, has died. The contributions of the 95-year-old were felt from the grassroots community to the White House.

"Michelle and I were saddened to hear about the passing of Reverend T. J. Jemison. With visionary spirit and charisma, he led the country’s first boycott of segregated seating on public buses 60 years ago, and he went on to help eradicate legal segregation and improve voting rights laws for disenfranchised Americans. As a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and former president of the National Baptist Convention, he inspired Americans across our country with the courage of his convictions and the depth of his faith," said President Barack Obama in a statement. "As we mark the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice, we remember the legacy of trailblazers like T.J. Jemison, and commit ourselves to carrying that legacy forward in the years to come.  Our nation is a better place because of Reverend Jemison’s struggle and sacrifice, and our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends, and loved ones."

Rev. Raymond Brown, a New Orleans-based community activist and president of National Action Now, told The Louisiana Weekly, “A lot of young people may not know much about Rev. Jemison, but all of the freedom fighters and anyone who is serious about learning the history of the Civil Rights Movement know exactly who he was and what he contributed to the struggle...He stuck his neck out there and was on the front lines of the struggle for civil rights two years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He opened a lot of doors for a lot of people and forever changed the course of American history.”

Jemison’s son, Ted Jemison, told The Associated Press that his father, who once served as president of the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., died Friday evening, Nov., 15, of natural causes at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center.

Theodore Judson Jemison was born in 1918 in Selma, Alabama where his father, the Rev. David V. Jemison, was the pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church. He came from a family of prominent ministers and strong churchgoing women. He attended local segregated schools.

Jemison earned a bachelor’s degree from Alabama State University, a historically Black institution, where he pledged Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the same fraternity Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a member of. Jemison earned a divinity degree at Virginia Union University to prepare for the ministry, and later enrolled in graduate courses at New York University.

In 1953, while serving as pastor of Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, La., a post he held for 54 years, Jemison helped lead the first civil rights boycott of segregated seating on public buses. The organization of free rides, coordinated by churches, was a model used later in 1955-1956 by the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama. Jemison was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.

Although the critical role Rev. Jemison played in laying the foundation for King’s successful boycott are still not widely known or celebrated, in 2003, the city of Baton Rouge commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Baton Rouge bus boycott.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sought Rev. Jemison’s advice when organizing the famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., two years later, Ted Jemison said of his father.

One thing King wanted to know was how the leaders of the Baton Rouge boycott arranged carpool rides for Blacks so they could avoid using the buses, Ted Jemison told The Advocate.

King wrote about the Rev. T.J. Jemison in his book, Stride Toward Freedom.

When King became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was founded in New Orleans, T.J. Jemison was the organization’s first secretary, his son said.

“He came up in a time when there was overt racism, but he always preached togetherness. He also believed that everybody deserves a fair share. I think that’s one of the greatest things about him. He never changed his tune. He believed in a man’s worth, regardless of skin color,” Ted Jemison said Nov. 16 in a telephone interview.

Ted Jemison said his father also was a kind and giving man.

“He made so many people happy by giving up what he had, personally, and he enjoyed doing that,” the son said.

T.J. Jemison also served as president of the National Baptist Convention USA Inc., the largest Black religious organization in the U.S. from 1982 to 1994, and met with seven U.S. presidents during his lifetime, Ted Jemison said.

Jemison is credited with overseeing the building of Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tenn., the headquarters of the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., during his tenure as president.

Todd Sterling, a trustee at Mount Zion First Baptist Church, said T.J. Jemison will be remembered as a "visionary leader.”

“The world has lost an icon in the Baptist ministry and the civil rights arena,” Sterling told The Associated Press. “He was a pioneer in race relations.”

While the Baton Rouge boycott is not as well-known and did not last as long as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, it sparked a movement that led to the birth of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement.

The Advocated reported that eats in the front of Baton Rouge city buses were for white riders only. Even if those “white” seats were empty, Black riders had to stand if seats set aside for them in the back of the bus were full.

In a 2003 newspaper story marking the boycott’s 50th anniversary, 84-year-old Freddie Green recalled sitting guard duty with a shotgun on Jemison’s front porch. Green remembered crosses burned in the minister’s yard and at the church.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr’s top aides and a longtime friend of Rev, Jemison, said Jemison’s contributions to making life better for those who followed extend far beyond voting and civil rights and into the world of college sports. “When LSU plays Alabama,” Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, told The Advocate. “there’s some T.J. Jemison in that. He laid the groundwork for bringing down the Sugarcane Curtain that led to Black players playing” on formerly all-white college football teams.

Baton Rouge Mayor-President Kip Holden remembered Rev. Jemison as an engaging minister with a great sense of humor.

“He had that big hearty laugh,” Holden told The Advocate. “When something really was funny, you would know — you could be in another room — and you would know the big hearty laugh.”

Holden, who considered Rev. Jemison a mentor, said he learned from the affable civil rights minister that nothing of lasting significance could be accomplished without the presence of God. “If more young people, not just in Baton Rouge but throughout the nation, would just take a moment, go back and read the history of this man,” Holden said, “maybe that would get them to turn their lives away from any violence and turn it directly towards reaching out to the community to make it better.”

“He was a trailblazer and … a man that left a mark on our history and really taught many of us as young African Americans the importance of being able to stand up for what you believe in,” Metro Councilwoman Tara Wicker told The Advocate. “Not being afraid, but at the same time doing things in a peaceful manner that allowed for a community to heal.”

“We’re expecting Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and Rev. Al Sharpton and other civil rights icons to fly in for the funeral on Saturday,” Ted Jemison, Rev. Jemison’s son, told WAFB 9 News.

Ted Jemison also said  that while Mt. Zion First Baptist Church could only accommodate 1,200 worshippers, it was the only place where his dad’s homegoing services could be held because it was the only house of worship the Rev. T.J. Jemison built.

“[T]here was no other place this celebration could be,” Ted Jemison said.

Rev. Jemison was laid in repose at the State Capitol Rotunda in Baton Rouge on Friday, Nov. 22. His wake was held that evening at Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. His funeral was held Saturday, Nov. 23, also at Mount Zion.

Nov. 26

Despite Help, Emotional Impact of HIV Still Overwhelming
By Karen Moore

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - As she stares at herself in the mirror preparing for another day, hidden behind her beauty is a secret that no one could ever imagine, a secret that changed her life almost nine years ago.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, “1 in 32 black women at some point in their lifetime will be diagnosed with HIV Infection.”

Mariana, (who has asked that her real name not be used in order to protect her medical privacy), a 34-year-old Black mother of two, residing in San Francisco, has been living with the HIV infection for the past nine years. She became aware of her status in early 2005 and from that moment on, her life, in her words, has been a constant battle to find the woman she used to be. A battle she says she is losing every day.

Mariana contracted this disease while in a relationship with a former boyfriend. Her eyes waters, she turns away from the camera before she starts telling how she and HIV became life partners.

“I thought I was in love. He was everything I wanted and even though my family told me he was no good for me it didn’t matter because the way he made me feel outweighed it all,” she said. In a relationship with this man for seven years, Mariana says she had no idea that any type of infidelity was going on in her relationship.

“I trusted him. I knew he had children with other women but I also knew that he was my man and we were together. So with that in my head and my heart I trusted this man because I loved him,” she said.

It wasn’t until a routine medical exam, that Mariana found out that the same man she had loved and trusted for seven years had given her the HIV virus. She was heartbroken but more so confused and confounded - an experience for many women across the nation. An overwhelming majority of HIV infections among Black women (87 percent) are attributed to heterosexual sex, according to the CDC.

With a look of disbelief as if the moment had just happened, she recalled, “I read over those test results for hours. I could not believe what I was seeing. How could this be possible? How could I not know?”

She said that her first thought after that was about her children. “No he is not the father of my children. Thank God, I contracted this virus well after my babies were born!”

Being that her twins, a boy and a girl were born in 1998, Mariana says she is grateful that this burden does not have to be carried by the only children she will ever have. Her memory is foggy about how she approached him about the infection.

All she could muster up was the fact that the conversation and the relationship ended with him swearing that he wasn’t HIV positive and she must have gotten the virus from somewhere or someone else.

According to the CDC, some of the reasons behind African-American women contracting the HIV virus stem from being:

• Unaware of their partners’ risk factors or behaviors
• Unprotected vaginal sex
• Unprotected anal sex
• Sexual abuse
• Intravenous drugs and/or other substance abuse

Exacerbating these reasons are stigma, fear, discrimination, homophobia, and negative perceptions about HIV testing, all of which tend to slow down HIV/AIDS awareness and testing.

With tears running down her cheeks, Mariana expresses her regret, “If only I would have had the courage to ask, to go get tested more often. Instead I was blinded by love, now stuck with a life sentence worse than the ones given to those on death row.”

Medical science now offers multiple ways to pro-long life after an HIV diagnosis. Many people have now lived decades with the virus.  But, at nine years, Mariana is still pessimistic.

“I’ve had some of the best doctors San Francisco County has to offer and some of the best meds on the market to help me get through this but nothing makes a difference,” she says, reflecting on her emotional and psychological state.

San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86, which deals solely with the treatment of HIV/AIDS patients, promotes that people can lead a long lasting, healthy life with HIV based on the treatment plans that are available today.

Some of these guidelines – for personal protection as well as the protection of others - are specified by the CDC as follows:

• Stay healthy (take your meds).
• See your doctor regularly.
• Do tell (make sure your partner knows your status).
• Don’t take risks such as sharing needles, toothbrushes, razors, etc.

Despite having some of the best physicians and medicines on her side, Mariana still struggles to continue the fight. She is not alone.

According to Womenshealth.gov, “Women living with HIV/AIDS have to deal with many challenges. They may face stigma from other people, a lack of support, unemployment, low income, low self-esteem, sexual assault, and depression.”

It continues, “People living with HIV are more likely to have depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. They may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Some may even have thoughts of suicide.”

The website, a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, encourages women dealing with HIV to get help for their mental health, which is “just as important as your physical health.”

It lists a network of support and the following ways to find help:

• Contact a local AIDS organization. They can direct you to support groups or to providers, services, and information for emotional and psychological support.
• Call the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National AIDS Hotline at 800-CDC-INFO (232-4636). They can also connect you with resources in your area.
• Find out if your health plan, including Medicaid, will pay for counseling.
• Talk to a case manager through your health insurance organization or at an AIDS clinic or hospital. They are trained to help you find the mental health you need.

“It is normal to feel down, or even devastated, after being diagnosed with HIV or during the course of the disease. A support network can help you cope with tough times,” the website states. “But when feelings become severe, won't go away, and limit your ability to stay healthy, you should talk with your doctor.”

Now addicted to crystal meth, Mariana's hopelessness appears to be increasing: “I no longer want help, they can keep their meds! I’m happy with the person I am. My children know Mommy loves them and I owe no one any explanations because if you walked a day in my shoes you would ask what do I have to live for?”

Nov. 26, 2013

Vantage Point 
Buy Black on “Black Friday”
By Dr. Ron Daniels

Special Commentary

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In my most recent article, I called upon the Black Nation and our allies to seize the X-MAS season (the commercialized, corrupted, capitalist version of Christmas) to intensify the Justice for Trayvon Martin, Economic Sanctions/Boycott Florida Campaign.

This call was/is grounded in the conviction that Africans in America have been far too passive in the face of unspeakable acts of indignity heaped upon the race. I am convinced that a rekindled spirit of resistance will result in victories over the oppressive forces that seek to reverse the gains of the historic and heroic Black Freedom Struggle.  Collectively Black people continue to be neglected, disrespected, disregarded and abused because we have become too tame, tolerant and even accepting of our oppression. 

This is not to say that there is no fight-back or resistance.  The problem is that we lack a “critical mass,” a much larger number of Black people, who are sufficiently enraged and outraged, to act decisively to promote and protect/defend our interests and aspirations.  This is the challenge we must overcome.

The X-MAS season provides an excellent opportunity for Africans in America to engage in a season of resistance.  The corporate retail establishment in this country is heavily dependent upon this season for consumers to participate in a frenzy of buying to buttress their bottom line. The unofficial kick-off of the “shop until you drop” season is the Friday after Thanksgiving  -- which has popularly come to be known as “Black Friday” – the day when the corporate retail giants begin an all out effort to induce, seduce, bribe and otherwise “persuade” consumers to buy enough goods to enable companies to “break into the black” – achieve profitability for the year!

Unfortunately, the sons and daughters of formerly enslaved Africans in America, who complain about the oppressive conditions of stop-and-frisk, joblessness, the War on Drugs, crime, violence, fratricide  and the murder of unarmed Black men like Trayvon Martin are not immune to the seductive appeal of the X-MAS season.  On Black Friday, Black consumers will lineup with liberated White folks in the reckless race to give our hard earned/precious dollars to the oppressor!  We are addicted.  We must educate and organize to kick the habit.

Black Friday should mark a critical point of resistance for Black people, a time when Black consumers utilize the billions of dollars in our hands as a weapon to advance the Black Freedom Struggle. I have often said if Black people would commit to “keeping Christ in Christmas,” focus on the spiritual and family aspects of the season and consciously refuse to participate in the senseless buying frenzy, the White Corporate establishment would come running, asking what concessions they should make to end the economic sanctions.  Black people have more than 1 trillion dollars of consumer buying power in our hands.  The question is whether we have the consciousness, commitment and discipline to use it to promote and defend Black interests.

There is no better time to renew a spirit of resistance than the present.  Black people all across the nation should resolve to Buy Black on “Black Friday.” At a minimum, Black people should seek out Black businesses and purchase as many gifts as possible from them to bolster the Black economy. Veteran activists like Bob Law have long advocated Support Black Business Days to encourage Black consumers to shop at Black stores.

He is advocating a similar campaign this year. In addition, Black communities can organize Black Expos on Black Friday where scores of Black vendors and businesses can be assembled under one roof to display their wares for sale. For example, in New York, under the visionary leadership of Rev. Dennis Dillon, the Emancipation 2013 Freedom Coalition is organizing a two day Black Friday Expo November 29^th and 30^th at the 69^th Regiment Armory in Manhattan. 

This kind of Expo could become a model for Black communities nationwide.  The Support Black Business Days and Black Expo events exemplify the first principle of the utilization of Black consumer power – Black dollars should be used to support Black businesses and entrepreneurs as a means of building a strong economic infrastructure to employ Black people.

The second principle of the utilization of Black consumer power is that companies/corporations that depend on Black dollars must be compelled to reinvest in Black communities!   Black dollars should be used as leverage with businesses and corporations that depend on Black consumer dollars.  It is reasonable to expect and demand that businesses and corporations that we patronize reinvest dollars back into the Black community in the form of jobs, advertisement in Black media, sponsorships and contributions to worthy causes.  And, we should not accept peanuts or chump change in exchange for the massive dollars we spend, enriching businesses and corporations owned by interests external to the Black community.  Our inner-city neighborhoods are dying for lack of jobs and investment. Therefore, we absolutely cannot permit businesses to grow fat off our dollars without demanding reinvestment in our communities.  Those who refuse to do so must face the wrath of economic sanctions – and there is no better time to target offending businesses/corporations than the X-MAS season when their profitability depends on Black dollars!

As the corporate retail establishment prepares to launch the X-MAS season, let us transform it into a season of resistance - Remember Trayvon Martin: Boycott Florida...Buy Black on “Black Friday!”

Dr. Ron Daniels is President of the Institute of the Black World 21^st Century and Distinguished Lecturer at York College City University of New York. To send a message, arrange media interviews or speaking engagements, Dr. Daniels can be reached via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..