T. J. Jemison

Theodore Judson Jemison, better known as T. J. Jemison, was minister of Mount Zion First Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in June 1953 when he led a bus boycott to protest the city's segregated public transit. It was the first boycott of its kind in the modern civil rights movement. He quickly organized a free-ride system to offer car transportation to the city's black residents while the boycott was in effect. This system was studied by Martin Luther King Jr. and served as a model two years later during the Montgomery bus boycott.