Howard founded Mississippi's leading civil rights organization in the 1950s, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership; and played a prominent role in the investigation of the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till in the late 1950s.

After a residency at Homer G. Phillips Hospital (in St. Louis, Missouri), Howard became the medical director of the Riverside Sanitarium, the main Adventist health care institution to serve blacks.

The turmoil was so great that Howard transferred, in 1942, to the hospital of the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor and took over as the first chief surgeon.

He also founded an insurance company, restaurant, hospital, home construction firm, and a large farm where he raised cattle, quail, hunting dogs, and cotton.

He sought the support of political actors for his public health endeavors, most famously in his failed attempt to erect a Veteran's Hospital with the help of two white supremacist Senators.

His compatriots in the League included Medgar Evers, whom Howard had hired as an agent for his Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company; and Aaron Henry, a future leader in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Arenia Mallory, a principal of a private black school in the county seat Lexington, Mississippi, was also on the board of directors of the RCNL.

In 1954, Howard hatched a plan to fight a credit squeeze by the White Citizens Councils against civil rights activists in Mississippi.

At his suggestion, the NAACP under Roy Wilkins encouraged businesses, churches, and voluntary associations to transfer their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis.

Howard moved into the national limelight after the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 and the trial of his killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, in September.

He delivered "[o]ne of the earliest and loudest denunciations of Till's murder," saying that if "the slaughtering of Negroes is allowed to continue, Mississippi will have a civil war.

He allowed his home to be a "black command center" for witnesses and journalists, including Clotye Murdock Larsson of Ebony magazine and Rep. Charles Diggs.

[2] "Recognizing that local officials had little incentive to identify or punish every member of the conspiracy that took Till's life, he spearheaded a private investigation, personally helping to locate, interview, and protect several important witnesses.

After an all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant, Howard gave dozens of speeches around the country on the Till killing and other violence in Mississippi, typically to crowds of several thousand.

He consistently praised the educator Booker T. Washington, late president of the Tuskegee Institute, whom he regarded as a "towering genius" for his emphasis on self-help and entrepreneurship.

He "had little patience for the utopian schemes of the far left, declaring at one point that he wished 'one bomb could be fashioned that would blow every Communist in America right back to Russia where they belong.'

In a similar vein, he said, 'There is not a thing wrong with Mississippi today that real Jeffersonian democracy and the religion of Jesus Christ cannot solve'.

"[2] His medical and political endeavors exposed him to the generational poverty among the black community in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, leading him to give public support for the desegregation of schools.

In 1958, Howard ran for Congress as a Republican against the powerful incumbent black Democrat, Rep. William L. Dawson, a close ally of Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Although he received much favorable media publicity, and support from leading black opponents of the Daley machine, Dawson overwhelmed him at the polls.

Howard was unable to counter Dawson's efficient political organization, and rising voter discontent because of the economic recession and the reluctance of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower to back the civil rights movement in the South.

It nurtured the black independent movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which eventually propelled four of Howard's friends to higher office: Ralph Metcalfe, Charles Hayes, and Gus Savage to Congress, and Harold Washington as mayor of Chicago.

In 1972, Howard founded the multi-million-dollar Friendship Medical Center on the South Side, the largest privately owned black clinic in Chicago.

Howard also believed the various controversies were "a smokescreen by the medical and political establishment to quash their lower-priced competitors" because "an abortion at the FMC cost about fifty dollars less than at hospitals."