Rev. Joseph Lowery

"We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations." ~ Inaugural Benediction, January 20, 2009

Joseph E. Lowery was born October 6, 1921 in Huntsville, Alabama. His father was a mortician and his mother was a teacher. He earned a bachelor's degree from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, a divinity degree from Paine Theological Seminary, and a doctorate in divinity from the Chicago Ecumenical Institute. He is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

While pastoring Warren Street Methodist Church in Mobile, Alabama in 1955 Lowery was head of the Alabama Civic Affair Association during the Montgomery bus boycott. When boycott leaders joined together after its successful resolution to form the Southern Christian Leadership Convention, he was named vice president of the SCLC. He later served as board chairman (1967-1977) and president (1977-1997) while leading churches in Mobile, Birmingham and Atlanta.

With Martin Luther King

Currently Lowery is currently best known for giving the benediction at President Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009. The prayer made many references to familiar phrases from the civil rights movement, starting with a verse from James Weldon Johnson's Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing and closing with a controversial allusion taken from Bill Broonzy's Black, Brown and White Blues.


A celebration for Lowery's 90th birthday is scheduled for this Sunday in Atlanta.

Vernon Jordan

"There is a definition of black America but no definition of white America. And we are just as mixed up in views, needs, and aspirations as any other group of people. It's never been monolithic. There's always been dissent. There's always been a difference of opinion, and a difference of approach. And that's healthy."

Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr. was born August 15, 1935 in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana in 1957 and earned a law degree from Howard University in 1960. He joined the law firm of Donald L. Hollowell in Atlanta, where Constance Baker Motley also worked. The firm won a suit in Federal court against the University of Georgia over the enrollment of Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, and Jordan gained national coverage escorting Hunter to the admissions office past a mob of white protesters.

Jordan later served as Georgia NAACP Field Director, as Director of the Southern Regional Council's Voter Education Project and as Executive Director of the United Negro College Fund. In 1970 he was named President of the National Urban League, where he originated the annual State of Black America reports.

On May 29, 1980 Jordan was shot by Joseph Paul Franklin in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Franklin was acquitted of attempted murder in 1982 but later confessed to the shooting.

After recovering from his injuries, Jordan resigned from the Urban League and joined the law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld. He was part of President Bill Clinton's transition team in 1992-1993 and continued to serve as an adviser to Clinton, a close friend. In 2000 he became Senior Managing Director of Lazard Freres & Co., LLC, an investment banking firm. He serves on a number of corporate boards.

"What I know about this world is that white people will take care of themselves. And what I have learned is that if you are where they are on an equal basis, they cannot take care of themselves without taking care of you."

Jordan was awarded the 2001 NAACP Spingarn Medal. He is a member of Omega Psi Phi and Sigma Pi Phi fraternities.

Benjamin E. Mays

Every man and woman is born into the world to do something unique and something distinctive and if he or she does not do it, it will never be done. ~Benjamin E. Mays

Benjamin Elijah Mays, whom Martin Luther King Jr. called his "spiritual mentor", was born August 1, 1894 in Greenwood County, South Carolina. After graduating as high school valedictorian, he attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine where he graduated with honors as a class leader in 1920. He explained his choice of a primarily white, New England college in his 1971 autobiography Born to Rebel, saying "How could I know I was not inferior to the white man, having never had a chance to compete with him?"


Mays then taught at psychology, debate and religion at Morehouse College in Atlanta and pastored Shiloh Avenue Baptist Church before attending the University of Chicago where he earned an MA (1925) and PhD from the School of Religion (1935). With Joseph Nicholson he co-authored The Negro's Church in 1933, a study funded by the Institute of Social and Religious Research.

With Bates College Debate Team, 1920

Mays served as Dean of the Howard University School of Religion from 1934 to 1940. During this time he traveled to India, meeting Mohandas Gandhi and was greatly influenced by Gandhi's view on non-violent resistance. He then became president of Morehouse College, a position he held until 1967.

While at Morehouse he excelled at fundraising and other administrative duties, keeping enrollment steady during World War II. He avidly supported students participating in sit-ins during the 1960's, one of a minority of college presidents nationwide to do so. In addition to Dr. King, other alumni he influenced were theologian Howard Thurman, Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond. After retirement he served on the Atlanta Board of Education from 1970 to 1981, becoming its first African American president.

Mays died in Atlanta on March 28, 1984 at the age of 89. He was a member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity. His philosophy of education is reflected in these quotes from Born to Rebel:

"The tragedy doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. It isn't a calamity to die with dreams unfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It isn't a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for."

"To me black power must mean hard work, trained minds, and perfected skills to perform in a competitive society.The injustices imposed upon the black man for centuries make it all the more obligatory that he develop himself…. There must be no dichotomy between the development of one's mind and a deep sense of appreciation of one's heritage. An unjust penalty has been imposed upon the Negro because he is black. The dice are loaded against him. Knowing this, as the Jew knows about anti-Semitism, the black man must never forget the necessity that he perfect his talents and potentials to the ultimate."

Whitney M. Young, Jr.

"Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reigns, all are unequal." ~ Whitney M. Young, Jr.

Whitney Moore Young, Jr. was born July 31, 1921 in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, near Louisville, where his father was president of the Lincoln Institute, an all-black boarding high school which is now the Whitney Young Museum. He attended Kentucky State University where he received a BS degree and was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.


During World War II Young served in a road construction unit in Europe. As a First Sergeant he was responsible for mediating between African American troops and white, mostly Southern, officers, developing skills that he would use throughout his career.


After the war Young earned a Master's degree in Social Work at the University of Minnesota and became involved with the St. Paul National Urban League. He later served at the League's president of the Omaha chapter.

With President Johnson, 1966

Young served as Dean of Social Work at Atlanta University from 1954 through 1961. During this time he also became Georgia State President of the NAACP. 


In 1961 he was chosen to serve as Executive Director of the National Urban League. He took the organization from a paid staff of 38 to over 1600 and the annual budget from $325,000 to over $6 million, while changing its middle-class emphasis to one focusing on the urban poor by being one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington and starting programs such as the "Street Academy" college preparation for high-school dropouts and a domestic "Marshall Plan" for American cities. 

These programs are detailed in Young's books To Be Equal (1964) and Beyond Racism (1969). They were also an influence on President Johnson's War on Poverty. Young served as a frequent advisor to Johnson, as he did with Presidents Kennedy and Nixon, and in 1969 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was also president of the National Association of Social Workers from 1969 to 1971, urging the profession to address issues of poverty and racial reconciliation. 

While attending a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria, Young drowned while swimming on March 11, 1971. He is remembered as one of the pioneers of community organizing and as a gifted negotiator able to bridge the gap between corporate America and the needs of the urban poor.

Louis T. Wright, M.D.

"There is no use saving the Negro from being lynched, or educating for sound citizenship if he is to die prematurely as a result of murderous neglect by America's health agencies solely on account of his race or color." ~ Dr. Louis Wright, 1937

Louis Tomkins Wright was born in LaGrange, Georgia, on July 23, 1891. His father was a doctor who had left medical practice to go into ministry and was a district superintendent for the Methodist Episcopal Church at the time of his death in 1895. Wright's stepfather, Fletcher Penn, was also a physician, being the first African American graduate of Yale Medical School. He practiced in Atlanta.

Wright received a bachelor's degree from Clark Atlanta University where he was class valedictorian, and was admitted to Harvard Medical School. He graduated fourth in his class yet was unable to find an internship in the Boston area. He was accepted by Freedmen's Hospital in Washington DC (affiliated with Howard University), and while there researched the use of the Schick test for diphtheria on African Americans.

Wright returned to Atlanta where he went into practice with his stepfather. In 1916 NAACP Field Secretary James Weldon Johnson came to Atlanta to start a local chapter. Wright joined and was elected treasurer. This marked the beginning of his life-long friendship with Walter White who was chapter secretary. At the outbreak of World War I Wright joined the Army Medical Corps and served in France, where he won a Purple Heart after being exposed to phosgene gas.

After the war, Wright settled in New York City, where he worked for the Health Department at applied for staff privileges at Harlem Hospital. When he was hired at the hospital six months later, four white physicians resigned in protest and Dr. Cosmo O'Neal, the hospital director who hired him, was transferred to working the gate-booth at Bellevue Hospital. However, other African American doctors were subsequently hired and the New York City Civil Service Commission reorganized the administration of the city's hospitals, creating the Department of Hospitals. By 1929 Wright had been promoted to assistant visiting surgeon and was also named NYPD Police Surgeon. He became the first African American to become a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons (1934) and to become a Board Certified Surgeon, one year after the Board was created (1939).

Inspired by the discrimination he had experienced and overcome throughout his career, Wright fought for equality in medical education and in medical care for all people. He continued be be active with the NAACP and was elected to its Board of Directors in 1931, becoming Chairman in 1934. Reunited with Walter White, who had become Executive Director, he secured funding from the Carnegie Foundation to research and make recommendations concerning health care needs of African Americans. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1940.

In 1939 Wright was stricken with tuberculosis, likely due to lung damage during the war, and was hospitalized in Ithica, New York, for most of the next three years. Returning to the staff at Harlem Hospital in 1942, he was named Director of the Department of Surgery, and the physical limitations from his illness led him to concentrate on research. He developed a metal plate for knee fractures and a neck brace, as well as becoming known as becoming known as an expert on head injuries and skull fractures. He headed the team that first used Aureomycin, and published over 35 papers on the use of antibiotics. He was also one of the pioneers of chemotherapy in treating cancer. In total, he had approximately 100 papers published in medical journals.

The library at Harlem Hospital was named in Wright's honor months before he passed away on October 8, 1952 at the age of 60. Colleague Aubrey Maynard, who had been the first African American intern at Harlem Hospital in 1926, wrote these words recalling the occasion:

“Like some of his era, [Wright] had viewed with cold horror the scene of a lynching. He had known the surging fury of defiance when a mob moved toward his home and family. From boyhood he had felt the spur and the obligation to gain educational and professional status to fulfill the aspirations of devoted parents. He had been a black soldier in a white man’s army which fostered segregation and seethed with prejudice and injustice. Through the depression he had struggled to support his family as a doctor in the ghetto. Physical disability had eroded his strength. He had learned the promises and evasions and maneuvers—and occasionally the successes—of political life in a racist society. Step by step, he had gained professional and personal stature. Now, at his celebration of his sixtieth birthday, he cherished the hope that untold thousands would pass to fulfilled lives through the doors that he had opened. His friends, who remembered the long years, rejoiced with him.”

The above quotation is from the  June 2000 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, which contains an excellent article on Dr. Wright and the status of health care for African Americans at the time of his research.

Walter F. White

"I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." ~ A Man Called White, Walter F. White

Born in Atlanta, Georgia on July 1, 1883, White was one of the organizers of the Atlanta Chapter of the NAACP. In 1918, James Weldon Johnson asked him to join the national staff as Assistant National Secretary. He investigated lynchings and riots throughout the country, using his appearance -- 27 of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents were white -- to gain information about groups such as the KKK. These findings were used to support the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1923 but defeated due a filibuster in the Senate.

In 1931 White succeeded Johnson as leader of the NAACP. He created the Legal Defense Fund under Charles Hamilton Houston, who soon recruited protege Thurgood Marshall. He also worked closely with President Truman in the 1948 desegregation of the military. He lead the NAACP until his death in 1955 and saw a five-fold increase in membership to 500,000.

White was also part of the Harlem Renaissance, writing novels Fire in the Flint, based on his experiences investigating lynchings, and Flight, on the migration of southern African Americans to the cities of the north. He also promoted the work of other writers such as poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.