Jack Lowe Sr.
He was active on the boards of the Community Relations Commission, Salvation Army, American Red Cross, Urban League, YMCA and Girl Scout Council.
She taught Jack Lowe pride and self-reliance, fed and clothed him, and putting him through college during the heart of the Great Depression.
Two months after Lowe began his senior year at North Oak Cliff High, the stock market crashed.
GE had formed an Air Conditioning Department at Bloomfield, New Jersey in 1932, and Lowe was transferred there after completing training at Schenectady.
The management put him to work at selling and overseeing the installation of large commercial units in the region just south of the Great Lakes.
In 1938 at the age of twenty-five, Lowe was chosen to superintend the installation of an air conditioning system at Wolf and Dessars, the largest department store in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
While in Fort Wayne, Lowe married Harriet Fuelber, the daughter of a prominent local attorney, just three weeks after their first date.
He was assigned to Signal Corps projects stateside for the duration of the war, and eventually discharged in San Antonio shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Surviving from tuberculosis depended on early detection, regular medication, at least nine months of nearly absolute inactivity, and in extreme cases, surgery.
Lowe began to look at Texas Distributors as less as an instrument for the production of wealth than as a device that could create well-being for the growing number of people who were a part of it.
Later, when the first major cash crisis moved him to approach his employees with the problem, and to offer them a chance to invest in the company, the stock they received had no voting rights connected to it.
Lowe and Dickinson worked on ideas that would improve the church, and encouraged the congregation to confront social and economic problems in the community.
He successfully increased the budget, and two programs were begun: one a citywide counseling service staffed by ministers, and the other a permanent ministry at the county jail.
A third program and by far the most controversial was Block Partnership, a plan to help solve problems in minority neighborhoods and to improve race relations by linking them with comparatively affluent white church groups.
In 1954 with the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end racial segregation in public schools, the Citizens Council soon acknowledged that desegregation was inevitable, and they sought to make the best of it.
In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students could be bused in order to achieve racial desegregation, and after a compelling presentation by a group of young, minority men known as the “Dirty Dozen,” the Chamber of Commerce established a small Urban Affairs Office.
Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans remanded U.S. District Judge William M. Taylor's desegregation order and a new plan was called for.
Lowe's last tenure with the Alliance began when he was sixty-five, and as its end neared two years later, the group was considering amending its bylaws to allow him to serve yet another term.
But Jack collapsed as he was on his way to a Dallas Citizens Council Luncheon shortly before the end of his term as president, and he died over a week later on Thanksgiving Day, 1980.
