Likes: 
Joseph Lowery, civil rights leader, dies at 98
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a leader in America's civil rights movement, died Friday.
He was 98.
Lowery's death was confirmed by family representative Imara Canady, who said he died of natural causes.
Often called the "dean" of the civil rights movement, he worked hand in hand in the movement's formative years with the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson.
He once said he missed "Martin" and other civil rights activists who had died before him. But he felt that God was keeping him for a single cause: To address the injustices of the criminal justice system, particularly toward poor black men.
"It's the last facet here of racial oppression," Lowery once said of the American criminal justice system.
Lowery said it was an encounter with a policeman at his father's sweets shop when he was 12 or 13 years old that triggered his desire to work as a civil rights activist.
"A big white policeman was coming in, and he punched me in the stomach with his nightstick," Lowery told the Atlanta Tribune magazine in 2004.
"He said, 'Get back n-----. Don't you see a white man coming in the door?'"
Lowery received numerous honors late in life. He delivered the benediction at President Obama's inauguration in January 2009, and Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom six months later.https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/27/us/jo...ead/index.htmlLowery was a co-founder of the SCLC
In 1957, as racial tensions rose across the United States, Lowery helped start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference civil rights organization with King. Their work helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President Lyndon Johnson signed.
"We had been through sit-ins and kneel-ins where we had been beat up and locked up and cussed out and locked out," Lowery said in a 1994 interview. "It was a milestone, a watershed. It helped America take off the cloak of official segregation."
Reply With Quote
