Joseph Lowery

Joseph Echols Lowery was born on October 6, 1921, in Huntsville, Alabama, the son of LeRoy Lowery, who managed a pool hall and a general store, and Dora Fackler Lowery, a part-time teacher. As a boy he felt the sting of the segregated South firsthand; at fourteen he was beaten outside his father's store by a police officer for failing to step aside for a white man, an injustice that helped kindle a lifelong calling to freedom.

Ordained in the Methodist ministry, Lowery served congregations in Alabama and Georgia while leading the Alabama Civic Affairs Association in Mobile in the effort to desegregate buses and public accommodations. In 1957 he joined Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black southern ministers to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, becoming one of its earliest architects and helping steer the movement through Selma, Birmingham, and beyond.

From 1977 to 1997 he served as the SCLC's third president, guiding the organization for two decades and earning the honored title "dean" of the civil rights movement. His witness reached across generations, from the marches of the 1960s to the anti-apartheid and social-justice campaigns of later years.

In 2009 he delivered the benediction at the first inauguration of President Barack Obama and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. He died on March 27, 2020, in Atlanta, at the age of 98. May the courage of Joseph Lowery, who turned wounds into witness, be remembered with reverence.