Dr. Joseph E. Lowery to receive Medal of Freedom

Lowery’s honor much deserved - Selma Times Journal
For nearly two decades the Rev. Joseph Lowery was the co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which had its genesis in Montgomery during the bus strikes in the mid-1950s.

He walked beside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to bring worldwide attention to the plight of African Americans who were denied the right to vote on the basis of their skin color. That Selma-to-Montgomery march forced the hand of President Lyndon Johnson to urge passage of the national Voting Rights Act in Congress.

But his activism did not stop there. He is co-founder and former president of the Black Leadership Forum, a consortium of African-American advocacy groups, which protested apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s until Nelson Mandela was elected president.read it here

16 'agents of change' get Medal of Freedom
U. of C. geneticist among awardees named by Obama
By Mark Silva | Washington Bureau Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - -- President Barack Obama, attempting to spotlight several "agents of change," announced Thursday that he will bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, on a cast of living and deceased figures widely known in politics, the arts and sciences, sports and social movements.