Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery looks at today's movement
A Civil Rights Icon
By Jonathan Gramling

    Although his illustrious career has been overshadowed by the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with whom he co-
founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) back in 1957, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowery has been a
champion for the civil rights movement for the past 50 years. The NAACP called him the “dean of the civil rights movement”
when they gave him its lifetime achievement award in 1977.
    While Lowery was thick in the trenches of the civil rights cause for 50 years, he took over the reigns of the SCLC and led it
for the next 20 years during the era of Reaganomics, the movement in the U.S. against apartheid in South Africa, and the
retrenchment of the gains made during the civil rights movement. He is co-founder of the Black Leadership Forum and the
convener of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda. Lowery is truly a civil rights icon.
    Lowery is a very personable individual who gets around quite well for an 86 year old. Although he is an historic figure,
Lowery is gracious with those he meets, continuously posing for photographs with those assembled. He has a wicked sense of
humor and is quick on the uptake of the things that are going on around him. It is quite easy to see how he has maintained
his position as one of America’s preeminent civil rights leaders over the past 55 years.
Lowery captivated the audience when he spoke at the 23rd Annual City-County King Holiday Observance at the Overture
Center on January 21. Lowery filled the Capitol Theater with adherents to the cause of civil rights and observations about
the civil rights movement.
    Before he departed for Wisconsin, The Capital City Hues conducted a telephone interview with Lowery at his home in
Atlanta. During that interview, Lowery reflected on today’s civil rights movement.
    While some may feel that the civil rights movement has declined in recent years, Lowery feels that the movement has
undergone a form of transformation, spurred on by its successes. “The civil rights movement has proliferated,” Lowery said. “It
no longer has to carry the struggle in a solo fashion. The spirit of the movement has pervaded and dispatched people in
every field of life in the country so that people are advocating and working to advance civil rights in every discipline. We
don’t have to depend solely on the civil rights organizations. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need them. We do continue to
need them because somebody must be an expert. Somebody has to be professional and keep it pertinent, meaningful, and
focused. But the advocacy, efforts and energy directed toward advancing the cause is in every level of life.”
    “There are people who occupy positions in business who because of the civil rights movement have assumed
responsibility for serving well, which is a form of advocacy, and for pushing where they can to open doors for others that they
have walked through,” Lowery continued. “There are people in education and government. We have 300 some Black mayors
who, for the most part, work to further equal opportunity in business, education and so on. So the civil rights movement may
not be as visible because it’s spread out across the spectrum of various disciplines in the country. And not all of it is done by
the civil rights organizations themselves. We could focus and measure what was happening with a greater facility when the
entire burden was on the civil rights groups. They inspired people everywhere and made it possible for people to gain
employment and upward mobility in every field. They have an obligation themselves to help those who are coming behind.
So I think the movement is healthy, but it might not be as obvious as it has been.”
    Lowery also feels that the media lost interest in the civil rights movement after King was assassinated in 1968. “Hopefully,
we kept people reaching for the stars even if they didn’t get to touch them,” Lowery said. “And the flame of hope continued
to burn. We didn’t have the help that we had when the media was focused on the movement. But the media got tired and
weary and went to other places. And that’s one reason we pushed elected officials hard because the media’s interest shifted
when we started getting these Black elected officials. If you didn’t run for office, the media wasn’t interested in what you had
to say. We have 41-42 members of Congress. There are attorneys working in various aspects of the criminal justice system,
many of whom advocate for rights and expanded opportunities. So they are inside and because they got inside by virtue of
the movement, they feel obligated to push themselves to open doors for those who remain outside. So I think it is a broader
picture. And it may not be as able to be discerned by media who lowered the issue of civil rights as a priority steadily and
consistently for the past 30-40 years.”
    One of the biggest issues facing America to day, according to Lowery, is the increasing gap between the rich and the
poor in this country. “The gap between rich and poor isn’t just a civil rights issue,” Lowery said. “It’s a class issue as well. It’s
broader than the traditional scope of civil rights, but nonetheless, it is a pertinent issue and has to be addressed by those
who want to see equal opportunity. The disparities in this country are shameful and growing. And it’s not limited to race. I
think Black folk tend to be on the bottom. When America as a whole has a bad cold, Black folks have pneumonia. We’re at
the bottom of the pit. But the issue is bigger than race. We have more poor White people in the country than we do Blacks.
We have more Whites on welfare. What is it that the top eight percent own about 90 percent of the wealth? It’s simplistic to
think that is a race or civil rights issue. That’s an issue that deals with the nature of our economic system. We are greedy and
elitist. We are unsympathetic to the plight of the poor. The privileged few and the corporate grip on America — pretty much
a populist perspective as articulated by John Edwards — I think is a fact of life in this country. And we have to address it from
a coalition perspective and not as a Black issue.”
    When asked about recent efforts to reintroduce the End Racial Profiling Act, Lowery again brought a racial and class
perspective to it. “We need enforcement more than anything else,” Lowery emphasized. “That’s one of the paradoxes of life
in these United States. We have more Black police officers and more Black police chiefs. And yet, we have this profiling
continuing to plague the relationship between minorities, particularly the poor, and the police. It’s one of the paradoxes we
have to continue to address. In Birmingham, I spoke there a couple of years ago. A Black mayor met me at the airport and
gave me the keys to the city. Not long before that, old Bull Conner had the paddy wagon meet us, lock us up and throw away
the key. But in the shadow of those city halls where Black mayors preside, poverty still stalks the lives of the poor, which are
disproportionately Black, but most poor people are White. And so we have a class situation that we haven’t begun to face in
this country. And it’s clear in the growing disparity between those who have more than they will ever need and those who
have less than they always need.”
    Nowhere was that more apparent, according to Lowery, than in the impact of Hurricane Katrina. “I think Katrina pulled
the cover off of how really serious we were at the public sector level about poverty,” Lowery said. “Katrina not only revealed
to the world that there was still a kind of stagnant level of poverty, but it also revealed that we didn’t plan to do much about
it. People of New Orleans tell us every day that we won’t believe how little has been done in spite of all the hullabaloo and
so forth. The other thing Katrina did was show us these vast empty warehouses and sites where industry came down south at
the invitation of some of the business people because they were going to keep wages low. And low and behold, business
discovered that the further south they went, the lower the wages got. So they didn’t stop in Louisiana, Mississippi and
Alabama. They went on down to Mexico and Honduras and Costa Rica. So we have not really since the beginning of the
War on Poverty been serious about eliminating poverty. It’s been like the War on Drugs. Both of them have been a War on
the Poor.”
    Lowery also feels there is a connection between the criminal justice issues that have a disproportionate number of
African Americans in the country’s jails and prisons and the economic issues that many Americans face. “The criminal
justice system of 2008 is too much like the criminal justice system of 1908,” Lowery said. “In many places, it’s getting
difficult to tell the difference. We are inventing a new kind of slavery with so many poor people in prison. In my state of
Georgia, for example, we just a few years ago got a statewide indigent defense system, which meant that every judicial
district was left on its own to provide representation for those who couldn’t afford it. That’s a terrible system. That means that
we are two-thirds of the folks in jail and we’re one-third of the population. So criminal justice remains one of the top issues.
And we can’t leave out education because the issue of desegregating the schools leaves the poorest students in the worst
schools and that’s not healthy. Somebody made a study recently of the poorest 20 counties and the four richest counties.
And most of the poor counties were in areas of the country where racism and anti-unionism and lack of enthusiasm of
federal support for federal education reigned. And that’s par for the South more than anything else. And so, in a sense, those
are all rights issues, but they transcend what we traditional consider civil rights.”
    When asked what his greatest achievement, Lowery jokingly said “just surviving.” And although the media deserted the
civil rights movement on many levels, Lowery is proud of his accomplishments in an era of fading media coverage and
diminishing resources for civil rights causes. “We kept marching,” Lowery emphasized. “We kept protesting. We kept
picketing. We kept voting. We kept educating. We kept advocating. And little by little, we made progress. We moved from a
handful to a thousand or more Black elected officials when Martin died and we are now approaching about 10,000, which
didn’t happen through osmosis. It was the result of pressure from the movement. That’s what made that progress. So I’m
proud of the many things we’ve done. We’ve continued to preach nonviolence. For the most part, we kept most people who
were advocates and active in the movement committed to nonviolence. Even though they weren’t committed to it
philosophically or theologically, they were committed to it pragmatically. And I’m proud of that. I’m proud of many things
and I don’t take credit for everything that happened, but we kept the spirit alive in spite of the fact that we didn’t get the kind
of media attention. A lot of people wondered what we were doing because they didn’t see it on the headlines. But I’m proud
of the fact that we survived the fray and we’re able to hold up the bloodstained banner and continue to apply the moral
imperatives of our faith to political, economic and social problems. I think we kept the movement within the context of
morality and what is right, and not necessarily what is legal. I’m very pleased with that.”
    When asked what his biggest disappointment has been, Lowery mention the little progress that has been made in
bridging the gap between White and Black incomes. “When the SCLC was organized in 1957 in New Orleans, I think the
median income for Blacks was about 57 percent that of Whites,” Lowery recalled. “And that was 50 years ago. Now we are
about 60-67 percent. It took us 50 years to move 10 percent. At that rate, it will take us another 150 years to reach parity. It’s
a slow process.”
    While others have retired from the civil rights movement, at 86 years old, Lowery remains quite active. In addition to his
speaking engagements, he heads up the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda. And he continues to fight the good
fight because the movement is in his soul. What else would one expect from a civil rights icon.
Rev. Dr. Jopseph Lowery speaks at the 23rd
Annual City-County King Holiday Observance in
the Overture Center's Capitol Theater