SCLC Veteran Lowery to Offer Prayer at Inaugural
Dec. 17, 2008
The Rev. Joseph Lowery has been invited to participate in the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama.
The 87-year-old Lowery co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and headed the Atlanta-based organization for 20 years.
Lowery says Obama personally asked him to deliver a prayer at the ceremony. He says he's "very humbled and very honored by the invitation to this historic event."
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/251/story/548593.htmlFrom Wiki:
American civil rights careerLowery was pastor of the Warren Street United Methodist Church, in Mobile, Alabama from 1952 until 1961. His career in the civil rights movement began in the early 1950s in Mobile, Alabama. After Rosa Parks' arrest in 1955, Lowery helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott. He headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places. In 1957, with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and subsequently led the organization as its president from 1977 to 1997.
His property was seized in 1959 along with that of other civil rights leaders by the State of Alabama as part of a libel suit. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the suit reversed. At the request of Martin Luther King Jr., Lowery led the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. Lowery is a co-founder and former president of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of black advocacy groups. The Forum protested Apartheid in South Africa in the mid 1970s until the election of Nelson Mandela. Joseph Lowery was among the first five African Americans to get arrested at the South African Embassy in Washington D.C. during the Free South Africa movement. Lowery served as pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta from (1986-92), adding over a thousand members and leaving the church with ten acres of land. He is now retired but remains active in the civil rights movement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lowery Some will recall the eulogy he delivered at Corretta Scott King's funeral.
George and Laura do. Heh-heh.