Tuesday was Women's Equaltiy Day, the day set aside, since 1971, to celebrate women's right to vote in the U.S.

This year it happened on the second day of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. It had slipped my mind because I was volunteering at the convention until I got me assignment for the day.

I have been doing a lot of different things volunteering with Host Committee at the convention, including driving. Monday's driving assignments entailed taking another volunteer, the mother of one of the Finance Committee's members, to her assignment at the Presidential Experience. Although my conversation with her was interesting, I was hoping for more assignments Tuesday.

I didn't get more assignments, but it was definitely interesting.

I was asked to pick up James Lowery at his hotel and transport him to a luncheon at the Stapleton Doubletree. While the name sounded familiar, it ended up not being James, but Joseph, and the luncheon was not just any luncheon, it was the National Women's Equality Day luncheon hosted by the Georgia delegation. Two women were being honored, both former First Ladies: Rosalynn Carter and Senator Hillary Clinton. But let's back up.

The Reverend Joseph Lowery has been an instrumental part of the Civil Rights movement was the pastor the Warren Street United Methodist Church in Mobile, Ala. After Rosa Parks was arrested in 1956, he helped lead the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott. With Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was that organization's president from 1977 to 1997.

He spoke at Coretta Scott King's funeral in 2006. With three former U.S. presidents and George W. Bush in attendance, he said, "We know now that there were no weapons of mass destruction over there (Iraq). But Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions, but no more for the poor!"

Here was one of the great and brave civil rights leaders right in my SUV (hybrid) with his wife Evelyn and other family members and friends. This is someone I would probably have never met otherwise, yet he was funny and treated me like a friend, even as a family member.

Evelyn Lowery, who was one of the special guests, has also been active in the Civil Right's Movement, having participated in the Selma to Montgomery March and founded SCLC/Women's Organizational Movement for Equality Now, Inc., which works for equality for women, children and families and the corresponding problems of those who have been disenfranchised.

I would have loved to have had hours rather than minutes with all of them.

While I have to "guard the vehicle," I don't get to go to some of the events I carry people to (such as the Green Sunday concert), however, I did have to check to see when the event might be over. I came in just in time to see Rosalynn Carter accept her award. As Senator Clinton was the featured speaker that evening at the convention, she was unable to attend.

I had had the chance to meet Mrs. Carter in 1975 when she came to my college campus during the Presidential campaign. At the time, she was the First Lady of Georgia. Just months later, she was to be First Lady of the United States. She had taken refuge in the office I was working in. She didn't have to even acknowledge our presence. Instead, she talked with each of us as if we all mattered, shaking our hands. She had a type of class that is hard to find. Now with all the years of fame, she still portrayed that same class.

She had five minutes, although I doubt that anyone would have stopped her and I didn't happen to time her. But what she had to say was important, especially to this audience of women.

She praised the efforts of all the women there, many just like Evelyn, who have broken through the glass ceiling of the racial and gender barriers. She went on to praise her fellow awardee on not only having broken through the glass ceiling of gender, but to have come so far as to be a viable candidate in the primaries. No woman, she said, had come that far in the United States. And now was the time to continue building on what Senator Clinton had done. But now was also a time for unity and she urged these same women to remember that come election day.

One would think that after all this, it couldn't have gotten better, but it did. On the way back to the hotel, everyone was talking and bubbly. When Rev. Lowery said that he needed a holder for his credentials, I gave him mine, although at first he balked at the gift, humble as it was.

I would like to have been able to give him more. He and his wife gave me a memorable Women's Equality Day and Democratic Convention experience.