Civil Rights Icon Rev. Joseph Lowery Has Died

Rev. Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a social justice icon often hailed as the “dean” of the American civil rights movement, died on Friday night. He was 98 years old.

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He organized protests in the early 1950s aimed at desegregating buses in Mobile, Alabama, and was involved in coordinating the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, a watershed moment in the civil rights movement that ended segregation of the city’s public transportation.

In 1957, he and a number of other black ministers co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group originally headed by King and later led by Lowery that coordinated protests across the South.

Famously, Lowery personally delivered protesters’ demands to the state’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, after the 1965 march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, surrounded by the National Guard who protected him from Wallace supporters and state troopers barring his way.

Lowery accepted an apology from Wallace in 1995. ”Thirty years ago he beat us,” Lowery said to NPR at the time. “Thirty years later he came to greet us. I think that’s significant.”