Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,686

This is the grave of Rev. Joseph Lowery.

Born in 1921 in Huntsville, Alabama, Lowery grew up in the Black middle class of that city. His father owned a business and his mother was a teacher. But of course none of that would get in the way of white supremacy. When he was only 11, a cop punched him because he didn’t get off the sidewalk for a white person in the way the white thought he should. Lowery intended to shoot the cop, ran home to grab his father’s gun, but then his father intervened. Shortly after, his parents sent him out of Alabama, up to family in Chicago. He did eventually return to Huntsville, where he graduated from high school and then went to Knoxville College, transferring to Alabama A&M and then Paine College.

By this time, Lowery had decided to become a minister. He went to Payne Theological Seminary and then Chicago Ecumenical Institute for his Doctorate of Divinity. In 1952, he moved to Mobile, Alabama to pastor at the Warren Street Methodist Church. As someone who was not willing to sit around and allow white supremacy to win, as the experience as a child demonstrates, he fervently supported the civil rights movement and got involved in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, despite being a few hours south. Now, it’s worth noting here that we have something of a skewed vision of the civil rights movement because of Martin Luther King and a few others. We think it was a preacher-led movement. That’s not untrue, but it’s very true that lots of Black preachers were quite reticent to get involved, not wanting to get involved in politics and often, being leaders of the Black community, having come to arrangements with white leaders they did not want to jeopardize. It’s important to note then that for people such as Lowery, it wasn’t an inevitability they would take a leadership position in the movement, but rather the choice of a brave activist who had plenty to lose.

In 1957, Lowery was with King, Ralph Abernathy, and other leading civil rights ministers in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate the minister side of the movement. I might argue that the SCLC is somewhat overrated in our civil rights memory, especially given that most of the big movements that we remember really came from a combination of students and grassroots activists at the local level, but SCLC certainly had the resources to build on those beginnings and go into places such as Birmingham and Selma to lead massive campaigns.

Lowery paid a real price too. In 1960, an Alabama court convicted him of libel after a New York Times advertisement from the SCLC criticizing the treatment of civil rights protestors by the city of Montgomery. The city politicians sued and won a $500,000 judgment against four leading ministers, including Lowery. The state then seized all his property, including his car. This became New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 case that restricted public officials suing for defamation, a decision very much on the chopping block for conservatives, who despise the truth about them being published in a news article. The Court unanimously threw out the defamation suit and the state had to compensate Lowery for the property they had stolen from him.

Also, in 1963, someone bombed Lowery’s hotel room in Birmingham. The only reason he lived is that at the last minute he decided to go to Nashville. The KKK also took shots at him at least once, in 1979.

Lowery was involved in most of the major events of the SCLC led part of the movement, very much including the march from Selma to Montgomery, which he helped organize. After King’s death, Lowery rose in the SCLC to become second in command, behind Abernathy. But the SCLC did lose a lot of its vision after 1968. That doesn’t mean that people such as Lowery were not doing things. That’s not true at all. In fact, Lowery would remain a critical figure demanding change for the rest of his life. It’s just that the era of the mass campaign was over. Among his biggest actions in these years was the protest against apartheid in South Africa. He led the Black Advocacy Forum in coordinating responses in the U.S. against that terrible system of racial terrorism, which let’s not forget was strongly supported by such conservative figures as Ronald Reagan and Dick Cheney. Then in 1977, after Abernathy’s retirement, he took over as the head of SCLC. He eventually moved to Atlanta, pastoring at Cascade United Methodist Church from 1986-92.

Another thing about civil rights in the 70s is that the women, very marginalized by their husbands during the 50s and 60s, of the movement began to make their own agenda. That included Lowery’s second wife, Evelyn, buried here with him. She was born in 1925, also into the Black middle class, and had married Lowery in 1950, so she was there the whole time. She worked with him, marched from Selma to Montgomery, etc., but these preachers were very sexist guys, starting with King. When Stokely Carmichael joked the the position of women in SNCC was prone, he wasn’t just representing his own sexism, but that of the entire civil rights establishment. But in the 70s, with the rise of feminism, these women began to start their own organizations. Evelyn Lowery started the Women’s Organizational Movement for Equality Now, Inc. within SCLC. That fought for equality based on not only race, but also gender, in the South. She was later involved in HIV awareness issues and in public memory of the civil rights movement, including the building of monuments.

Now, late era Lowery is great. He just didn’t care if you liked him or not and he was more than happy to speak truth to power. In 2006, Coretta Scott King died. Her funeral brought in all the dignitaries. That included George W. Bush. For Lowery, this was an opportunity. He railed against the evils of the Iraq War and the lies Bush and Colin Powell had told to get the U.S. into that conflict to Bush’s face. Part of his eulogy stated, “We know now that there are no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor!” Of course conservatives howled in outrage. How dare Lowery politicize the death of Coretta Scott King, who evidently was not a political actor her whole life or anything!

In 2009, at Barack Obama’s inauguration, Lowery delivered the benediction. Borrowing a bit from Big Bill Broonzy, he concluded:

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, 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. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen! Say Amen! And Amen!

Once again, conservatives were outraged. Lowery did not care.

Lowery died in 2020. He was a remarkable 98 years old. Evelyn had died in 2013, at the age of 88. Not bad either.

Rev. Joseph Lowery is buried in Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other civil rights figures, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Dorothy Height is in Brentwood, Maryland and Ella Baker is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.