The co-founder (along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King) and President Emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Lowery has been a leader in the civil rights movement since the early 1950s, when he led the Alabama Civic Affairs Association in Mobile, Alabama, in a campaign to desegregate that city’s buses, public accommodations and police force.

In the almost 50 years since then, Lowery has been a seminal figure in the fight for equal rights throughout the nation, serving for 21 years as president and CEO of the SCLC,  leading the 1965 Selma-Montgomery march to the doorstep of then-Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, getting arrested in Atlanta in 1968 while fighting for the rights of the city’s garbage workers, serving as co-founder and chairman of the Black Leadership Forum, and meeting with national and international leaders, such as Nelson Mandela to Yasir Arafat.

One of the truly great Americans of the 20th Century, Lowery is a United Methodist minister with eight honorary doctorates who has also been honored by organizations as diverse as the United Auto Workers and the National Newspaper Publishers. Ebony Magazine has named him one of the nation’s fifteen greatest black preachers and has described him as the “consummate voice of biblical social relevancy, a focused prophetic voice, speaking truth and power.”