Rev. Joseph Lowery, MLK aide, at 98 - The Boston Globe

We have lost another of the great leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - the soul and brain trust of the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s.  Rev. Joseph K. Lowery, pictured here with Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and Rev. Andrew Young died at his home in Atlanta.  Writing in the Washington Post Krissa Thompson observes

‘‘They have made Martin a glorified social worker, and they have almost made our young folks believe that all Martin did was go around dreaming,’’ Rev. Lowery told members of an Atlanta church before a King holiday celebration in 2008. ‘‘He was a nonviolent militant. He was a Christian radical.’’
Late in his life, Rev. Lowery returned to the news pages when he became a vigorous supporter of Barack Obama, who chose Rev. Lowery to deliver the benediction at his presidential inauguration. Rev. Lowery said he saw in Obama a young man whose words tapped into the heartbeat of the people — just like the well-known speeches of the civil rights movement. Obama presented Rev. Lowery with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009."

Rev. Joseph Lowery, MLK aide, at 98 - The Boston Globe
by Krissa Thompson // WaPo
Rev. Lowery’s civil rights work began in the late 1950s when he helped start the SCLC, a nonviolent, civil disobedience organization. He was a member of the SCLC board and traveled often to meet with King and other leaders to help steer the organization, providing advice and participating in protests at the height of racial unrest in the South.
One night in 1963, a last-minute decision to take a late-night train home to Nashville to see his wife saved Rev. Lowery’s life. The Birmingham, Ala., hotel room that King had offered him that night was bombed. No one was killed but Rev. Lowery often recalled how close he came to death. He later used that and other near-death experiences to describe himself and other participants in the civil rghts movement as ‘‘a little crazy, good crazy,’’ willing to risk their lives to shake up the segregated South and usher in equal rights for Blacks.
Rev. Lowery often worked in the background, behind King. In March 1965, he came to the fore as chairman of the committee appointed to take protesters’ demands to segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama at the end of the five-day, 54-mile ‘‘Bloody Sunday’’ march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery.
Rev. Lowery described walking to the State Capitol steps and seeing a sea of blue-uniformed state troopers standing in front of the governor’s office. The National Guard was there too, authorized to protect Rev. Lowery. The guardsmen tramped in front of the state troopers and Rev. Lowery passed through.
‘‘Moses had the Red Sea, I had the blue sea,’’ he said in a 2008 interview with The Washington Post.
Rev. Lowery was also one of the four Black ministers sued in the seminal case of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964) , in which an Alabama official accused the newspaper and the civil rights leaders of libeling him in an advertisement. The ad was intended to raise funds for King’s defense against felony charges related to his 1956 and 1958 Alabama tax returns, but the lawsuit caught Rev. Lowery by surprise. He and the other defendants had not been informed that their names would be used in the ad.
An all-white jury initially ordered the ministers to pay $500,000 each. Rev. Lowery’s 1958 Chrysler Imperial sedan and other property were seized in Mobile, Ala., and sold at a state-ordered auction. The US Supreme Court eventually vindicated the ministers in a landmark ruling and set a higher standard in defamation lawsuits by establishing the precedent that public officials must prove that a defendant knowingly and maliciously made false statements about them.
Rev. Lowery’s stature and reputation grew as he outlived many other civil rights leaders. Following King’s assassination in 1968, the SCLC became rudderless and beset with infighting. By the time Rev. Lowery was elected SCLC president in 1977, the organization was $10,000 in debt and membership had fallen drastically.
Rev. Lowery raised money and returned the organization to solvency, while focusing it on a new set of civil rights issues.
He described his busy years at the helm of SCLC to Ebony magazine: ‘‘First we went to Mississippi and jumped on the Southern Company for buying coal from South Africa. Then we went to North Carolina and marched for Ben Chavis. Next we went to Decatur, Ala., for Tommie Lee Hines.’’

Chavis was part of the so-called Wilmington Ten, whose members were arrested in 1972 in North Carolina and convicted of conspiracy to murder charges. He and the others spent nearly a decade in jail.