(RNS) — The Rev. Joseph Lowery, a civil rights leader who worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and prayed at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, died on Friday (March 27).
Lowery was 98.
“Tonight, the great Reverend Joseph E. Lowery transitioned from earth to eternity,” the King Center in Atlanta tweeted. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. He was a champion for civil rights, a challenger of injustice, a dear friend to the King family. Thank you, sir.”
For more than 50 years, the United Methodist clergyman was involved in advocacy work, from desegregating buses to protesting apartheid to drawing attention to the AIDS crisis in Africa and the U.S. He co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King and served as its president for 20 years.
“His chapter in American history and African American history, in particular, is legendary, and his leadership as a part of the original Martin Luther King Jr. team cannot be exaggerated,” said the Rev. Otis Moss Jr., a retired Cleveland pastor who performed the wedding of Lowery and his wife, Evelyn Gibson Lowery, who died in 2013.
“The sacrifices and the dangers, the toils, the snares that he and Mrs. Lowery faced day and night across one of the most challenging periods of the 20th century: This is now a part of the indelible history of the American experience,” Moss…
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