Alice Mae Lee Jemison was an American political activist and journalist.
Background
Jemison was born on October 9, 1901, in Silver Creek, New York, just off the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation of the Seneca nation. Daniel A. Lee, her Cherokee father, a cabinetmaker by trade, and Elnora E. Seneca, her Seneca mother, were both graduates of Hampton Institute. She considered herself Seneca since she was raised by her mother and her relatives at Cattaraugus. Born into the matrilineal society of the Senecas, with its ancient traditions of women's behind-the-scenes political participation, she had the self-assurance that became the cornerstone of her later political crusades. Jemison's conservative Seneca background, with its strong suspicions of all non-Indian governmental authority, combined with the right-of-center political attitudes of western New York, and its historic distrust of Washington-directed policies, to mold her into a leading Indian opponent of the New Deal. Poverty plagued Jemison and her family throughout much of their lives.
Education
Although her goal had been to become an attorney, Jemison's formal education was limited because of family financial exigencies. She graduated from Silver Creek High School in 1919.
Career
From 1928, because of severe economic pressures, Jemison worked at various jobs to support her children and her mother: beautician, Bureau of the Census employee, clerk, confectionary store manager, dressmaker, factory worker, farmer, free-lance journalist, housekeeper, paralegal researcher, peddler, political lobbyist, practical nurse, secretary, and theater usher. The Clothilde Marchand murder case in Buffalo in 1930 was a major turning point in Jemison's life. Working closely with Seneca President Ray Jimerson and attorney Robert Galloway, she helped coordinate the legal defense of the two Indian women accused of the crime. Despite the strong anti-Indian feelings of the period, the women were eventually released from jail, largely through the defense team's efforts. During the trial Jemison wrote columns for the Buffalo newspapers, criticizing the prejudicial publicity, countering racial stereotypic portrayals of Indians, and appealing for evenhanded justice for the accused. The success of these articles led to Jemison's journalistic career. She later wrote a series of syndicated columns for the North American Newspaper Alliance from 1932 to 1934 and edited The First American, a newsletter she published in Washington from 1937 to 1940 and 1953 to 1955. Jemison became increasingly active in the political and economic concerns of American Indians. Disturbed by the terrible conditions of life on her reservation and throughout Indian America, she advocated the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which she accused of neither working for nor protecting Indians. She preached the sanctity of Indian treaty rights, especially the guarantees expressed in the Iroquois treaty of Canandaigua (1794), which she affirmed could not be unilaterally abrogated by non-Indian policy makers. Jemison was influenced by the writings and ideas of Dr. Carlos Montezuma, the noted Pan-Indian leader, who had urged the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs because of its overly bureaucratic nature and historic failures. In 1934, Jemison was appointed by the tribal council of the Seneca to lobby in Washington for the Beiter bill, which would guarantee Seneca jurisdiction over fishing and hunting on their reservations. When the Beiter bill was vetoed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, she was hired as a lobbyist by Joseph Bruner, an Oklahoma Creek who was president of the American Indian Federation. Jemison worked for this anti-New Deal organization until 1939, appearing at more congressional hearings during this era than any other Indian. Throughout the mid- and late 1930's she urged the removal of Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and repeal of the Indian Reorganization Act. Jemison accused Collier of wasting taxpayers' funds, excessive experimenting with Indian education, tampering with existing tribal political structures, pushing through authoritarian measures in the bureau's herd-reduction program among the Navajos, and general administrative incompetence. Jemison, in testimony and in The First American, advocated the causes of Sioux who questioned the legality of the Indian Reorganization Act referendum, Cherokees who opposed the construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway through their reservation in North Carolina, and California Indians who sought the recognition of treaty rights and redress for injustices to their ancestors. Throughout the 1930's she accused Interior Department personnel of being Communist and anti-Christian, and thus won support from the far right, including the Daughters of the American Revolution and William Dudley Pelley, the extremist leader of the Silver Shirts of America. Her unremitting war against the Bureau of Indian Affairs led her to appear in 1938 and 1940 before hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Although her activism primarily centered on nationwide Indian concerns, by 1938 federal officials were portraying Jemison as an Indian Nazi. This false charge was heightened, in the view of the American public, by her strong opposition to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940. Nevertheless, she passed every loyalty check made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was able to secure government employment in the Bureau of the Census during World War II. After the war Jemison again called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In spite of repeated governmental harassment for her past activism, she reestablished her newsletter, The First American. The ultimate irony of her career was that her fervent work over three decades for Indian self-determination was distorted by the congressional establishment of the 1950's through the policy of termination. It had the opposite effect on Indians from what she had envisioned. Jemison was foremost a Seneca woman, a political disciple of Montezuma, an evangelical abolitionist, an individual, who, until her death in Washington, D. C. on March 6, 1964, had complete faith in Indian peoples to rule themselves. Her militancy presaged much of the Red Power movement of the late 1960's and 1970's. Although she lived in Washington for thirty years, she remained close to her Seneca heritage by keeping abreast of tribal concerns.
Achievements
Jemison is best remembered as an activist, who was a major critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the New Deal policies of its commissioner John Collier. Her work was condemned by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration and she was described harshly in press conferences and before Congressional committees.
Connections
On December 6, 1919, Jemison married Le Verne Leonard Jemison, a Seneca steelworker; they had two children. The marriage ended in separation in December 1928.
