Rev. Dr. Vernon P. Howard, President, Southern Christian

The brutality of racism requires approaches that remedy the spiritual, social and economic causes which lie at the root of American society. America must be born again.

Rev. Dr. Vernon Percy Howard, Jr. is the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, a position which he has held since 2015.

A lifelong community activist, Rev. Dr. Howard led the successful $15 Per Hour Living Wage ballot initiative in Kansas City in 2017. It was the only successful $15 Per Hour initiative in the nation. He also guided the One City Economic Development Sales Tax Campaign to victory in 2017, which is channeling approximately $100 million over 10 years to invest in housing, neighborhood refurbishment, commercial development, jobs and small business opportunities in the most distressed ZIP codes in Kansas City, Missouri. In 2019 he directed the successful effort to rename a major thoroughfare in Kansas City “Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.” Earlier, he led a statewide civil disobedience demonstration which launched the movement for Medicaid expansion in Missouri in 2014.

Rev. Dr. Howard is currently the senior pastor of St. Mark’s Church of Kansas City. Prior to serving at St. Mark’s, he was the senior pastor at Second Baptist Church in Kansas City. He earned degrees from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri (BA, communications) and from Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Kansas (MDiv). His DMin is from the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University. Rev. Dr. Howard has taught as adjunct faculty at Central Baptist Theological Seminary, at William Jewell College, at the University of Arizona and at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. He has been a guest columnist for the Kansas City Star and is the host of the SCLC UPLIFT-People Power in Motion Radio Show.

Among many other honors, Rev. Dr. Howard was the recipient of the Invictus Social Justice Award from William Jewell College in 2018 and the Harold L. Holliday Civil Rights Award from the NAACP in 2019.

For more information on this series, visit https://www.jccc.edu/conferences/peacebuilding/