Rev. Joseph Lowery, 'Dean' Of The Civil Rights Movement, Dies At 98
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
America's lost the man known as the dean of the civil rights movement. The Reverend Joseph Lowery died Friday at his home in Atlanta. He was 98 years old. The co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he was part of pivotal moments in the nation's history, from the early civil rights struggle to the inauguration of the country's first African American president. NPR's Debbie Elliott has this remembrance.
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JOSEPH LOWERY: Fired up?
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Even in his 90s, Reverend Joseph Lowery's fervor never dimmed.
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LOWERY: Fired up?
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Ready to go.
LOWERY: Ready to go.
ELLIOTT: That was an appearance on the National Mall in 2013, 50 years after the March on Washington when he was there as a contemporary of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. At the 50th anniversary event, he warned that hard-fought gains were under attack.
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LOWERY: We ain't going back. We've come too far, marched too long, prayed too hard, whipped too bitterly, bled too profusely and died too young to let anybody turn back the clock on our journey to justice.
ELLIOTT: Joseph Echols Lowery was born in Huntsville, Ala., in 1921, the son of a teacher and a shopkeeper. The young Lowery experienced firsthand the brutalities of the Jim Crow South and would spend his life fighting for racial justice. One of the first protests he organized was as a young Methodist minister in Mobile, Ala., in the early 1950s. It was aimed at desegregating city buses. From there, Lowery helped coordinate the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the nonviolent movement that desegregated public transportation and led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As the new group's vice president, Lowery marched, survived jail and had his property seized by the state of Alabama. In the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march, Lowery led the delegation that delivered demands to segregationist governor George Wallace. Wallace turned state troopers on marchers as they crossed Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge.
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ELLIOTT: The violent confrontation prompted passage of the Voting Rights Act. Four decades later at a gathering of civil rights foot soldiers in Montgomery, Lowery reflected on that accomplishment.
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LOWERY: When we marched in '65 and when the act was passed, there were only about 300 black elected officials all over the country. And today, we are approaching 10,000. So it changed the face of the nation.
ELLIOTT: Lowery was a gregarious figure with expressive, bushy eyebrows and his signature soul patch below his lower lip. He remained at the helm of the SCLC for decades. His social consciousness spread to a broad range of issues at home and abroad, from apartheid in South Africa and Palestinian liberation to police brutality and states rights. In the 2016 election, he implored young people to get to the polls, saying, quote, "we labored in vain if you don't vote."
CLAYBORNE CARSON: There are long-distance runners in this struggle, and he was certainly one of those.
ELLIOTT: Stanford University history professor Clayborne Carson is the founding director of the Martin Luther King Research and Education Institute.
CARSON: He had been an activist even before the founding of SCLC, and he remained an activist long after lots of other people decided that the civil rights movement was over.
ELLIOTT: Lowery had a reputation as a rabble rouser, never one to shy away from the truth in deference to decorum. Speaking at Coretta Scott King's funeral in 2006, he faced a front row packed with presidents and their spouses - two sets of Bushes, the Clintons and the Carters.
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LOWERY: I'm gonna behave.
(LAUGHTER)
LOWERY: Lord, have mercy (laughter).
ELLIOTT: But before long, he was taking on President George W. Bush and the Iraq War.
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LOWERY: We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there.
(CHEERING)
ELLIOTT: The audience roared to a standing ovation.
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LOWERY: But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here.
ELLIOTT: In 2008, Lowery backed then-Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president. It was a split with many movement veterans who supported Hillary Clinton's campaign. President Obama asked Reverend Lowery to give the benediction at his inauguration a year later. Lowery told NPR what it was like to get that phone call.
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LOWERY: It struck me forcefully that, hey, you're talking to - you really are talking to the 44th president of the United States, and he's a fellow that looks like you.
ELLIOTT: Lowery said despite fighting for voting rights so that one day there might be a black president, he never imagined he would live to see that day. He did and offered this prayer for the occasion.
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LOWERY: And in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right, that all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Amen.
LOWERY: Say amen.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Amen.
LOWERY: And amen.
ELLIOTT: Later that year, Mr. Obama awarded Lowery the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lowery and his late wife Evelyn established the Lowery Institute for Justice & Human Rights at Clark Atlanta University. There, a new generation is learning to forge change through nonviolent tactics. Debbie Elliott, NPR News.
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