Joseph Echols Lowery was an American minister in the United Methodist Church and leader in the civil rights movement.
27 Facts About Joseph Lowery
2.
Joseph Lowery founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr.
3.
In 2009, Joseph Lowery received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from US President Barack Obama.
4.
Joseph E Lowery was born to Leroy and Dora Lowery on October 6,1921.
5.
Joseph Lowery's mother was a teacher and his father owned a small business in Alabama.
6.
Joseph Lowery ran home to get a gun, but his father arrived and talked him out of it.
7.
Joseph Lowery's family sent him away while he attended middle school in Chicago, staying with relatives, but he returned to Huntsville, Alabama, to complete William Hooper Councill High School.
8.
Joseph Lowery was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
9.
Joseph Lowery attended ministerial training at Payne Theological Seminary and later on, he completed a Doctor of Divinity degree at the Chicago Ecumenical Institute.
10.
Joseph Lowery married Evelyn Gibson in 1950, a civil rights activist and leader in her own right.
11.
Joseph Lowery was the sister of the late Harry Gibson, an activist, and elder member of the Northern Illinois conference of the United Methodist Church, Chicago area.
12.
Joseph Lowery was pastor of the Warren Street Methodist Church, in Mobile, Alabama, from 1952 to 1961.
13.
Joseph Lowery headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, an organization devoted to the desegregation of buses and public places.
14.
At the request of King, Joseph Lowery participated in the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965.
15.
Joseph Lowery was a co-founder and president of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of black advocacy groups.
16.
Joseph Lowery was among the first five black men to be arrested outside the South African Embassy in Washington, DC, during the Free South Africa movement.
17.
Joseph Lowery served as the pastor of Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta from 1986 through 1992, adding over a thousand members and leaving the church with 10 acres of land.
18.
Joseph E Lowery Boulevard is just west of downtown Atlanta and runs north-south beginning at West Marietta Street near the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology and stretching to White Street in the "West End" neighborhood, running past Atlanta's Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Morris Brown College.
19.
Joseph Lowery advocated for LGBT civil rights, including civil unions and, in 2012, same-sex marriage.
20.
Joseph Lowery received the inaugural Walter P Reuther Humanitarian Award from Wayne State University in 2003.
21.
In 2004, Joseph Lowery was honored at the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King Jr.
22.
Joseph Lowery was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama, on July 30,2009.
23.
Joseph Lowery was given the Fred L Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute that year.
24.
In 2006, at Coretta Scott King's funeral, Joseph Lowery received a standing ovation when he denounced the violence of war in Iraq compared to injustice for the poor, remarking before four US presidents in attendance:.
25.
On January 20,2009, Joseph Lowery delivered the benediction at the inauguration of Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America.
26.
Joseph Lowery opened with lines from "Lift Every Voice and Sing", known as "The Negro National Anthem", by James Weldon Johnson.
27.
Joseph Lowery concluded with the following, an interpolation of Big Bill Broonzy's "Black, Brown and White":.