Dean of civil rights movement
A lieutenant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he helped organize the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.
NEW YORK — The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, a lieutenant to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who helped organize a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement — the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama — and who gave the benediction at President Barack Obama’s inauguration more than half a century later, died Friday at his home in Atlanta. He was 98.
Even before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus on Dec. 1, 1955, Lowery had successfully campaigned to integrate buses in Mobile, Alabama, where he was a young Methodist minister. After Parks’ action, he huddled with King and other Alabama ministers to oversee a 381-day boycott of Montgomery’s segregated buses.
In November 1956, the Supreme Court ended racial segregation on buses in Montgomery and, by extension, everywhere else.
Lowery was at King’s side almost until the day of his assassination in April 1968. At King’s request, he presented the demands of voting-rights marchers from Selma, Alabama, to Gov. George C. Wallace in 1965. Lowery also helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led it for 20 years.
When King gathered with top aides days before his death, it was Lowery who ended the meeting by saying, “The Holy Spirit is in this room.”
Lowery marched in countless demonstrations, was repeatedly arrested and was once shot at by the Ku Klux Klan. As head of the SCLC, he promoted economic empowerment for black Americans. He became known as the dean of the civil rights movement.
David J. Garrow, author of “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said in an interview in 2010 that Lowery was “the most prominent survivor” of the movement, “the human and symbolic link going all the way back.”
Joseph Echols Lowery was born on Oct. 6, 1921, in Huntsville, Alabama. His family sent him to Chicago to live with relatives, but he returned to Huntsville to finish high school. He attended Paine College in Augusta, Georgia.
He then worked for a black newspaper in Birmingham, Alabama, where he reported on racist violence. In Birmingham he met Evelyn Gibson, whom he married in 1947. She died in 2013.
Lowery’s survivors include three daughters.
Feeling a call to preach, Lowery enrolled in the Payne Theological Seminary in Wilberforce, Ohio. He was ordained in the United Methodist Church and assigned to the Warren Street United Methodist Church in Mobile. Lowery joined King and two other Alabama ministers in leading the bus boycott in Montgomery.
Lowery succeeded Ralph David Abernathy as president of the SCLC in 1977. In an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer at the time of his retirement as SCLC president in 1997, Lowery said he had succeeded in his principal goal: maintaining King’s organization as “a prophetic voice crying in the wilderness.”