Joseph Lowery

Joseph Echols Lowery was born on the sixth of October 1921 at Huntsville, Alabama, the son of Leroy Lowery — a Black confectioner of the Huntsville Coloured business district — and Dora Fackler Lowery, a teacher of the Coloured Public Schools. He was raised in the segregated Black-Huntsville middle-class household of his father across the closing decade of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the principal Huntsville Coloured Public Schools and at the Knoxville College preparatory programme at Knoxville, Tennessee for the closing portion of the secondary education. He completed the bachelor of arts at the Paine College at Augusta, Georgia in 1943 — having been ordained a deacon of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in 1943 — and took graduate study in theology at the Payne Theological Seminary at Wilberforce, Ohio in 1947 and 1948 and at the Garrett Theological Seminary at Evanston, Illinois in 1949.

He served the principal post-1948 senior Methodist Episcopal Church pulpits of the Mobile-Alabama-Methodist-Episcopal-South Annual Conference — predominantly at the Warren Street Methodist Episcopal Church South at Mobile from 1952 to 1961 and at the Saint Paul Methodist Church at Birmingham from 1964 to 1968.

He was named on the eleventh of January 1957 — at the Ebenezer Baptist Church meeting at Atlanta convened by Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive), Ralph Abernathy and Bayard Rustin — one of the sixty founding members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the principal closing-period founding-conclave of the SCLC. He served the SCLC executive board from 1957 onward as the principal Mobile-and-Alabama field organiser of the closing-period SCLC Alabama-Methodist-Episcopal pulpit-and-civil-rights network of the closing years of the 1950s and the 1960s.

He organised the principal post-1955 Mobile-Bus-Boycott-and-Mobile-Civil-Rights closing-period programmes of the closing years of 1955 to 1958 — at the principal post-Montgomery-Bus-Boycott Alabama-Methodist-Episcopal closing-period closing-period programmes.

He led the post-Selma 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March under the principal SCLC closing-period programmes of the closing months of March 1965 — and was the principal SCLC senior pastor of the closing months of the post-1965 closing-period programmes.

He was named in November 1977 — at the closing months of the principal post-Abernathy SCLC succession — the third president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and held the SCLC presidency for twenty years through to 1997.

He directed the SCLC across the principal post-1977 closing-period SCLC programmes of the closing years of the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s — including the principal 1981 Selma-to-Washington-Voting-Rights-Act-renewal march and the principal post-1990 SCLC voter-registration campaigns of the closing months of the post-cold-war American civil-rights movement.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the twelfth of August 2009 by President Barack Obama.

He died at Atlanta, Georgia on the twenty-seventh of March 2020 of complications of natural causes, at ninety-eight.

He is honored here as the third president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.