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.

Hiram Revels

“I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase…. If the nation should take a step for the encouragement of this prejudice against the colored race, can they have any grounds upon which to predicate a hope that Heaven will smile upon them and prosper them?”

Hiram Rhodes Revels was born September 27, 1822 in Fayetteville, North Carolina to a free mixed-race father and Scots mother. Although it was illegal to teach African American children at the time, he was secretly tutored by a free African American woman as a child, and was apprenticed as a barber by his brother. He then attended seminary in Indiana, and was ordained by the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845. After serving temporary appointments in several states he attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and was then appointed to a congregation in Baltimore where he was also principal of a boys' high school.

During the Civil War Revels helped form two Union regiments and served as a chaplain at Vicksburg, Mississippi, seeing action at the Battle of Vicksburg. After the war he moved from the AME Church to the Methodist Episcopal Church, and served in Lexington, Kentucky and New Orleans before settling in Natchez. He worked two years with the Freedmen's Bureau establishing schools near Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi.

Revels was elected alderman in Natchez in 1868 and to the Mississippi State Senate in 1869. On the first day the senate was in session in January 1870 he gave an opening prayer that fellow Natchez politician John R. Lynch described in his memoirs as "...one of the most impressive and eloquent prayers that had ever been delivered in the [Mississippi] Senate Chamber.... It impressed those who heard it that Revels was not only a man of great natural ability but that he was also a man of superior attainments." The State Senate was responsible for choosing U. S. Senators at the time, and Revels was elected to fill a one-year term in the unexpired seat that Jefferson Davis had vacated in 1861.

Opponents in the U. S. Senate claimed that Revels had been a citizen for only the two years since the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified, but the Senate voted to seat him by a margin of 48 to 8, and on February 25, 1870 he became the first African American United States Senator. Since that time there have been five others. Revels served on the Education and Labor Committee and the Washington D.C. Committee, unsuccessfully fighting a bill to keep Washington schools segregated.

After leaving the Senate, Revels was named president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University) in Claiborne, Mississippi, the first land-grant college for African American students. He resigned in 1874 for political reasons but returned two years later under a new state administration after having taught theology at Shaw College (now Rust College) in Holly Springs.

Revels retired from Alcorn in 1882 but continued in the ministry, pastoring a Methodist Episcopal Church in Holly Springs and later serving as district superintendent. He died at a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi on January 16, 1901 at the age of 78.

William Wilberforce

“So enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable did the Trade's wickedness appear that my own mind was completely made up for Abolition. Let the consequences be what they would, I from this time determined that I would never rest until I had effected its abolition.”

British abolitionist William Wilberforce was born August 24, 1759 in Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire. He attended St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was a classmate of future Prime Minister William Pitt. Wilberforce was elected to Parliament at the age of 21 while still a student. Although small and sickly from childhood, with extremely bad eyesight, he soon became known for his oratorical skills. Diarist James Boswell said this about him: "I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale."

Raised in a traditional Anglican family, Wilberforce had been introduced to evangelical Christianity during the years he lived with an aunt and uncle who were followers of Methodist preacher George Whitefield. His faith was reawakened on reading William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life in 1785. He became increasingly involved in moral and social issues and began working for the abolition of the slave trade in 1789. John Wesley wrote these words to him shortly before Wesley's death in 1791:

               "Unless the divine power has raised you up to be an Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be fore you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.
              "Reading this morning a tract wrote by a poor African, I was particularly struck by that circumstance that a man who has a black skin, being wronged or outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a "law" in our colonies that the oath of a black against a white goes for nothing. What villainy is this?"

Wilberforce worked with the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, led by Thomas Clarkson and Charles Middleton. This was perhaps the first grass-roots civil human rights organization, using many modern methods such as lobbying, public meetings, and even a logo (pictured at right) designed by Josiah Wedgwood.


Before Parliament could be persuaded to pass anti-slavery legislation, the war against France in 1793 created a more conservative climate and no progress was made for another decade. In 1804 Wilberforce introduced a bill prohibiting British subjects from participating in the slave trade which was passed within two years and took effect in March 1807.

Wilberforce continued to work to abolish slavery, even after his retirement from Parliament in 1826. Aided by the 1832 slave revolt in Jamaica, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 was passed just days before his death on July 29 of that year.

Ioan Gruffudd as William Wilberforce

Wilberforce is the subject of the 2007 film Amazing Grace, released on the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Ohio's Wilberforce University, the nation's oldest private historically black university, is named in his honor. His birthplace in Hull has been opened as a museum honoring the abolition movement.

Willa Player

"We don't teach our students what to think. We teach them how to think. If I have to give exams in jail, that's what I'll do." ~ Willa Player

Willa Beatrice Player was born August 9, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi and moved to Akron Ohio as a child. Few college opportunities were available for African American women at the time but with contacts made through the Methodist church her family was active in, she was able to attend Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio. She graduated in 1929 and earned an MA from Oberlin College the next year. She was immediately hired to teach Latin and French at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, a women's school also affiliated with the Methodist Church. She did post-graduate work at the University of Grenoble, France under a Fulbright Scholarship, and received her EdD from Columbia University in 1948.

Dr. Player quickly rose in the administration of Bennett, serving as Director of Religious Activities, Director of Admissions, Coordinator of Instruction, Vice President, and in 1956 was named President, becoming the first woman to serve as President of any four-year accredited college in the country. When no other institution in Greensboro was willing to host a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. for fear of retaliation by segregationists, she offered the Bennett facilities, saying, "Bennett College is a liberal arts school where freedom rings." She describes this, as well as a campus visit by Eleanor Roosevelt, in an interview by the Civil Rights Greensboro Oral History Project.

Undated Photograph from
DuBois Archives, UMass Amherst

King's speech may have planted the seed for the sit-ins that followed in February 1960 as North Carolina A&T students protested segregation at Woolworth's lunch counters. Bennett students, faculty and staff joined the protests; at one time about 40% of the Bennett student body was under arrest. While Dr. Player did not encourage students to protest, she supported those who did and were jailed, visiting daily and arranging for professors to hold class for them and give exams.

Dr. Player left Bennett College in 1966 to become Director of Development of College Support for the US Office of Education in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare where she initiated the Strengthening Developing Institutions program to gain financial support for minority schools. After her retirement in 1986 she returned to Akron where she served on many church and educational boards, and was named to the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame.

Dr. Player never married, saying, "I didn't have time for men. I was too busy educating the youth." She died on August 27, 2003 at the age of 94.