Women at the Forefront

“I took a strong stance against racial segregation. . . . Some of the Baptist pastors who were segregationists wanted Louisiana Baptist [Convention] to fire me.”

sponsoring meetings between black and white students.” Her decision to sponsor such meetings – black and white students together – also drew the ire and objection of pastors. “Some of the Baptist pastors who were segregationists wanted Louisiana Baptist [Convention] to fire me.” The pastors did not succeed at first due to the support and connections she had with the Baptist students on the various campuses in Louisiana. The White Citizens Council “wrote me up in their paper. I was

on the front page.” The council eventually prevailed upon the convention and that led to her firing. She explained her stance in simple terms. “Without trying to

be noble, I took a strong stance against racial segregation and was eventually fired from the Louisiana [Baptist] State Student Department.” For Louisiana Baptists, “the firing was deemed necessary” and was done ostensibly “to protect me from physical harm in certain parts of Louisiana.” She suggests the fear was genuine. “They feared for me going into north Louisiana because of the segregation that characterized so many of our churches there.” This firing led her back to Washington, DC, where she previously served for two years at First Baptist Church in Washington, between her time at Mars Hill and the WMU Training School. “My dear parents went to their graves not knowing why their beloved daughter left a job she loved with Louisiana Baptist students to go ‘live with friends in Washington, DC, and to look for another job.’” Her transition to the nation’s capital was aided by Robert

Denny, who was BWA associate secretary for youth at the time, and eventually became BWA general secretary in 1969, serving until 1980. The Dennys invited Echols to attend the Baptist World Congress in Miami Beach in 1965 and then to live with them for a time. She called this her “Briar Patch” (taken from a Br’er Rabbit story) because “I moved there without a job and everything started happening that was good for me.” She also explained that it was “at the Baptist World Congress where I caught a vision of working with the BWA.”

She worked at the Baptist Joint Committee (BJC) on Public

Affairs (now the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty) for a number of years during the 1960s. With BJC she served as a journalist, writing and sending reports from Capitol Hill, the nation’s congress, to a variety of news outlets, including Baptist Press. But she felt the sting of discrimination. “One of the problems I experienced then was the prejudice against women.” The new director who took over refused to allow her to continue using a byline – for her name to appear on the stories she wrote, a practice that prevailed before – and wanted her immediate boss’s name to appear there as the editor instead. “I loved my time living in Washington, working on The

Hill and writing for Baptist Press,” but she left the position and worked for a US congressman. She eventually served on the staff

6 BAPTIST WORLD MAGAZINE

“I am the first Christian in my family. My family is Buddhist.”

T

he Japan Baptist Women’s Union (JBWU) of the Japan Baptist Convention has a new executive secretary, Yukimo Yonemoto, who began her term of office on April 1. It is

the culmination of a journey that began in 2003 when Yonemoto made her profession of faith in Christ, leaving her Buddhist background behind. Sensing a call to the full time ministry of the church, she enrolled as a theology student at the Seinan Gakuin Baptist University in southwest Japan and graduates in 2016.

of Takoma Park Baptist Church in Washington before joining the staff at Mclean Baptist Church in Virginia, where she was ordained in 1987, the same year she joined the BWA staff. Echols was widowed twice. Her first husband, Robert MacClaren, a scientist, died in 1986. Her second, lawyer and congressman, M. Patton Echols, Jr., passed away in 2012. The BWA has been part of Echol’s life for decades, and this did not end with her retirement as BWA women’s director in 1995. Her association with the BWA began in 1958 when she attended the Baptist Youth World Conference in Toronto, Canada. Wanting to share this experience, she sponsored a group of students to accompany her to the next youth conference in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1963.

She said her time at the BWA “seemed to be the culmination

of all my interests and experiences;” a reason, perhaps, why she continued her interest in international affairs after retirement and offered her support to the BWA Women’s Department whenever she could.

u

YUKIMO YONEMOTO: Former Buddhist to

Lead Baptist Women in Japan