While Barack
Obama's choice of conservative California pastor Rick Warren
to give his inauguration's opening prayer has received
widespread criticism from progressives, his
selection of civil rights icon Reverend Joseph Lowery
to offer the closing prayer has been rather
overshadowed.
The 87-year-old
Methodist minister cofounded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and was the organization's third
president, after Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph
Abernathy.
"I'm overwhelmed.
I'm very grateful. I'm humbled and honored," Lowery
told the Associated Press on Friday. "When we worked on the
Voting Rights Act in the '60s, we hoped and felt that one
day there would be an African-American president. I
honestly can say I didn't think I'd live long enough
to see it."
According to
Affirmation, the United Methodists' LGBT contingent, Lowery
has a strong pro-gay record, including a stirring speech in
2000 to gay clergy stressing the need to expand work
for social justice and equality. In 2004, Lowery told
ABC News that he supports same-sex marriage.
"When you talk
about the law discriminating, the law granting a
privilege here and a right here and denying it there, that's
a civil rights issue," he said in 2004, according to
USA Today. "And I can't take that away from
anybody."
Lowery was a key
participant in the 1965 Selma-Montgomery march, leading
a delegation of marchers to pro-segregation Alabama governor
George Wallace. He was also a coordinator for the
Montgomery bus boycotts of the 1950s.
In 2006, at the
funeral of Coretta Scott King, with President George W.
Bush in the pews, Lowery spoke of ending poverty in the
United States and ending the war in Iraq. During
funeral services for Rosa Parks in 2005, Lowery
cornered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to urge her to
join his career-long fight to expand the federal
Voting Rights Act, according to TheAtlanta Journal-Constitution.
Lowery retired in
1992 from the Cascade United Methodist Church in
Atlanta but remains active in civil rights and politics. He
campaigned for Obama in several states, including Iowa
and Mississippi, as the chief of Obama's voting rights
advisory board. (Michelle Garcia, Advocate.com)
