President Obama will watch voting returns with the pastor who prayed at his 2008 inauguration and last week said that all white people go to hell when they die.

“We’ve gotten word that the Rev. Joseph Lowery, one of Barack Obama’s frontier supporters in 2008, will be at the side of the president and first lady tonight in Chicago,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

Lowery is a civil rights hero, but he made some inflammatory comments last week. “Lowery said that when he was a young militant, he used to say all white folks were going to hell,” the Monroe County Reporter (Ga.) reported in covering a rally where he spoke in Forsyth, Ga. “Then he mellowed and just said most of them were. Now, he said, he is back to where he was.”

Asked about his remarks later, Lowery said it was a joke.

Lowery called for black voters to turn out in support of Obama. “I don’t know what kind of a n—– wouldn’t vote with a black man running,” he said at the rally, per the Reporter.