KEY POINTS:
Joseph Lowery would have been forgiven had he retired gracefully to bask in the role he played in history 50 years ago.
Instead, the 82-year-old remains a dedicated activist, organising rallies and marches, fighting for unpopular causes and taking every opportunity to challenge powerful people, including US President
George W. Bush whose views and policies he opposes.
Lowery first met Martin Luther King when they were young pastors in Alabama in the early 1950s.
The two men founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, with pastors Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth and others.
Lowery's enduring commitment makes him a point of reference for other activists and he frequently challenges a younger generation for whom civil rights is a chapter in history books.
It also gives a clue as to how the career of Martin Luther King might have evolved had he not been assassinated in 1968.
"People continue to talk about a post-civil rights era, which implies we have won. We have won some battles but there is still a war," he said in an interview.
Lowery led the SCLC for two decades, starting in 1977. He has also set up the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda, which campaigns largely for local issues. But a speech last year brought him renewed national attention.
At the funeral for King's widow, Coretta Scott King, Lowery castigated Bush over Iraq while the President and his wife, Laura, sat in the audience.
"We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here," he said.
The speech was criticised as inappropriate given the setting. But Lowery defends it.
"I would never have been able to look in the mirror had I missed that opportunity to witness for truth. I was representing the civil rights community and talking about Coretta's life." The SCLC campaigned for voting rights and an end to the brutal system of segregation in the US South through marches, boycotts and sit-ins.
In the process it provided a platform for King, under whose leadership the movement put pressure on the Government that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But King was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, in April 1968. Abernathy died in 1990 and most other founders of the SCLC have also died.
Inevitably, that has led Lowery to reflect on his own friendship with the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and on the role he has played since King's death.
"Martin was the most unique person I ever met. He was intelligence on fire in the heart and head.
"He could walk with kings and presidents and shoot pool with the boys on the street corner," Lowery said.
"[But] he used to say in private that he wouldn't live till 40 and he died at 39," he said. "Why did the Lord let me live? I didn't think the Lord let me stay because I've been so good, that I've been so wise. If I stop fighting for justice maybe he's going to bring me home."
Lowery's recent causes include a campaign to release Genarlow Wilson, sentenced in 2005 to 10 years in prison in Georgia for having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.
The case reflects Lowery's concern for criminal justice reform. But he also preached in June at a revival meeting at singer Aretha Franklin's church in Detroit and introduced Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama of Illinois when he spoke in Atlanta in April.
Lowery says he supports Obama's candidacy. Obama and former US President Bill Clinton, whose wife is battling Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination, will likely praise Lowery's leadership at the 50th anniversary celebration of the SCLC, of which he is president emeritus.
But Lowery is suspicious of mythologising the civil rights movement and King's life because it tends to soften its militancy and deflect attention from today's challenges.
- Reuters