The Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, who has been called the dean of the civil rights movement, died Friday, The King Center said.
Lowery, 98, was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the Rev. Martin Luther King.
The Joseph and Evelyn Lowery Institute for Justice & Human Rights said he died peacefully at 10 p.m. surrounded by his daughters at home.
“Hailed as the ‘Dean of the Civil Rights Movement’ upon his receipt of the NAACP’s Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Lowery had assumed and executed a broad and diverse series of roles over the span of his nine decades: leader, pastor, servant, father, husband, freedom fighter and advocate,” the institute said in a statement.
Lowery, who delivered the benediction in President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Obama later that year.
“Born and raised in Jim Crow Alabama, preaching in his blood, the Rev. Joseph Lowery is a giant of the Moses generation of civil rights leaders,” Obama said at the ceremony. “It was just King, Lowery and a few others, huddled in Montgomery, who laid the groundwork for the bus boycott and the movement that was to follow.”
He was born in Huntsville, Alabama, on October 6, 1921, and in the 1950s, he headed the Alabama Civic Affairs Association, the organization that led the movement to desegregate buses and public accommodations, according to the Joseph & Evelyn Lowery Institute.
In 1965, King picked Lowery to chair the delegation delivering the demands of the Selma-to-Montgomery march to Alabama’s governor, George Wallace.