WASHINGTON: US civil rights leader Reverend Joseph Lowery who campaigned with Martin Luther King died on Friday aged 98.

“Our beloved, Rev Dr Joseph Echols Lowery, made his transition peacefully at home” surrounded by his daughters, the Joseph & Evelyn Lowery Institute said, adding “his legacy of service and struggle was long and rich.” Born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1921, Lowery worked closely alongside leading figures in the civil rights movement and with King co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) civil rights group in 1957.

He was chosen to speak at the inauguration of the country’s first black president Barack Obama in 2009, and later that year was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

“Rev Joseph Lowery was a fighter for civil rights,” fellow civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He spoke up spoke out he never gave up. He marched and he protested all across America. We mourn his passing this evening,” Lewis said.

“By being born black, I can’t ever remember not being in the movement,” Lowery told the Journal-Constitution in a 2001 interview. He recalled one day in 1933 that almost set him on a very different path to the civic action, protest marches and impassioned oratory that made his name.

Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2020