Civil rights leader Rev. T.J. Jemison dies at 95 | Home | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, LA

Civil rights leader Rev. T.J. Jemison dies at 95 | Home | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, LA: The Rev. T.J. Jemison, a civil rights icon known as the architect of the 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott, which later served as a nonviolent protest model for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Ala., died Friday.

He was 95.

Theodore Judson Jemison, commonly known as “T.J.,” died at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 15 at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, said Todd Sterling, a trustee at Mount Zion First Baptist Church on East Boulevard where Jemison preached for more than 50 years.

“There’s nobody that can replace him,” said East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Kip Holden. “He was very unique and will go down as one of the most unique people that ever walked the streets of Baton Rouge.”

On the cusp of the African-American civil rights movement in 1953, Jemison helped organize a boycott of Baton Rouge buses by black riders who at the time were forbidden by a city ordinance from sitting in front of white people. The eight-day protest did not end segregation aboard public buses in Baton Rouge, but did force the city to make concessions in regard to what bus seats black people could occupy.