"We Are Statesmen"

The nation's largest Negro church is the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. Its 5,000,000 members are fond of fervent gospel songs and sin-damning sermons, and show little interest in merging with more staid and sober white Baptist groups. Their kind of leader is the Rev. Joseph Harrison Jackson, the grandfatherly ecclesiastical politician who last week in Detroit was overwhelmingly elected to his twelfth consecutive term as National Baptist president.

Mississippi-born Dr. Jackson was first elected to the presidency shortly after the National Baptists had amended their constitution to limit tenure of the presidency to four one-year terms. In 1957, there was much hollering and chair throwing at the church's annual meeting when Jackson declared the amendment illegal and won himself an extra term. Three years later, the anti-Jackson forces united behind the Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn, but his election to the presidency was eventually overturned by the church's board of directors after a court battle. After failing to unseat Jackson in 1961 at a meeting so quarrel-ridden that one minister died during the commotion, most of Jackson's opponents quit the church to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which now claims about 500,000 followers.

Because he has stayed aloof from the civil rights revolution, Jackson is often called an "Uncle Tom" by local leaders of CORE, SNICK and N.A.A.C.P.; civil rights pickets periodically march outside his Olivet Baptist Church in south Chicago. In return, Jackson has denounced as un-Christian demonstrations outside segregated churches, and insists: "I can't harmonize picketing with praying." Jackson condemns civil disobedience on the ground that no one has the right "to break any law, even if it is morally wrong." He believes that integration should be achieved strictly through governmental process, and has urged his National Baptists to concentrate their efforts on voter-registration campaigns and congressional lobbying.

Jackson may well be out of step with the main trend of Negro feeling, but he notes with satisfaction that some civil rights leaders, in the aftermath of this summer's racial riots, have called for a moratorium on mass demonstrations.

"We are not Uncle Toms," he insists. "We are statesmen. We cannot be saved as a people unless America is saved as a nation."

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