Civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy (born 1926) was the best friend and trusted assistant of Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he succeeded as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a nonviolent civil rights organization.

Ralph David Abernathy, one of 12 children, was born in Marengo County, Alabama, about 90 miles outside of Montgomery. Originally named David, he was nicknamed Ralph by one of his sisters after a favorite teacher. His father William, the son of a slave, supported his family as a sharecropper until he saved enough money to buy 500 acres of his own, upon which he built a prosperous self-sufficient farm. He eventually emerged as one of the leading African Americans in the county, serving as a deacon in his church and on the board of the local African American high school and becoming the first African American there who voted and served on the grand jury. Ralph aspired early on to become a preacher and was encouraged by his mother to pursue that ambition. Although Abernathy's father died when he was 16 years old, the young man was able to obtain a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Alabama State University and a Master's degree in sociology from Atlanta University in 1951. During this time he worked as the first African American DJ at a white Montgomery radio station. While attending college he was elected president of the student council and led successful protests for better cafeteria conditions and living quarters. He earned the respect of both students and administrators, and he was later hired as the school's dean of men.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

Before obtaining his first degree, Abernathy was ordained as a Baptist minister and, after completing his education, served as minister at the Eastern star Baptist church in Demopolis, near his home town of Linden. When he was 26 he accepted a position as full time minister at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Three years later, Martin Luther King accepted a call to another of Montgomery's leading African American churches, Dexter Avenue Baptist. During this time King and Abernathy became close friends.

In 1955 an African American seamstress from Montgomery named Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger and she was arrested and later fined. This began an important historic phase of the civil rights movement. Through hurried meetings in their churches ministers, along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), began a boycott of the city busses until all African Americans were assured better treatment. The ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) - a name suggested by Abernathy - to coordinate the boycott and voted a young minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. their president.

The MIA convinced African American taxi-cab drivers to take African American workers to their jobs for a ten cent fare. When the city government declared that practice illegal, those with cars formed carpools so that the boycotters wouldn't have to return to the busses. After 381 days, the boycott was over and the busses were completely desegregated, a decision enforced by a United States district court. During 1956 Abernathy and King had been in and out of jail and court, and toward the end of the boycott on January 10, 1957, Abernathy's home and church were bombed. By the time the boycott was over it had attracted national and international attention, and televised reports of the activities of the MIA encouraged African American protesters all over the South.

Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement

King and Abernathy's work together in the MIA commenced their career as partners in the civil rights struggle and sealed their close friendship, which lasted until King's assassination in 1968. Soon after the boycott they met with other African American clergymen in Atlanta to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and press for civil rights in all areas of life. King was elected president and Abernathy the secretary-treasurer. This group began to plan for a coordinated nonviolent civil rights movement throughout the South, the ultimate purpose of which would be to end segregation and to hasten the enactment of effective federal civil rights legislation. In the early 1960s when the civil rights movement began to intensify because of student lunch counter sit-ins, nonviolent demonstrations, and efforts to desegregate interstate busses and bus depots, Abernathy moved to Atlanta, Georgia, to become the pastor of West Hunter Baptist Church. In Atlanta he would be able to work more closely with the SCLC and King, who had returned to the city at an earlier date.

The SCLC attempted to coordinate a desegregation movement in Albany, Georgia, in December 1961, but were not as effective as they hoped to be with their work there. Abernathy was arrested along with King during the Albany demonstrations, but they were quickly released from jail because the city leaders did not want to attract national attention to conditions in the city. In the spring of 1963 the leaders of the SCLC began to coordinate their efforts to desegregate facilities in Birmingham, Alabama. Publicity about the rough treatment of African American demonstrators at the hand of Eugene "Bull" Conner, the city's director of public safety, directed the eyes of the world on that city's civil rights protest. Abernathy found himself in jail with King once again. More than 3,000 other African Americans in the city also endured periods of incarceration in order to dramatize their demands for equal rights. The Birmingham demonstrations were successful and the demands for desegregation of public facilities were agreed upon. In the wake of the demonstrations, desegregation programs commenced in over 250 southern cities. Thousands of schools, parks, pools, restaurants, and hotels were opened to all people regardless race.

March On Washington

The success of the Birmingham demonstration also encouraged President John F. Kennedy to send a civil rights bill to Congress. In order to emphasize the need for the bill, leaders of all the nation's major civil rights organizations, including the SCLC, agreed to participate in a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. The "March on Washington" on August 28, 1963, attracted over 250,000 African American and white demonstrators from all over the United States. By the next summer the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law, and a year later, in 1965, the Voting Rights Act had passed.

On April 4, 1968, during a strike by city sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, King was assassinated, and Abernathy succeeded him as the leader of the SCLC. Abernathy's first project was the completion of King's plan to hold a Poor People's Campaign in Washington during which white, African American, and Native American poor people would present their problems to President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Congress. Poor people moved into Washington in mule trains and on foot and erected "Resurrection City." Abernathy once again found himself in jail, this time for unlawful assembly. After the Poor People's Campaign, Abernathy continued to lead the SCLC, but the organization did not regain the popularity it held under King's leadership.

Abernathy resigned from the SCLC in 1977 and made an unsuccessful bid for the Georgia fifth district U.S. Congressional seat vacated by prominent African American statesman Andrew Young. Later, he formed an organization called Foundation for Economic Enterprises Development (FEED), designed to help train African Americans for better economic opportunities. He continued to carry out his ministerial duties at the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, and lectured throughout the United States. In 1989 Abernathy published his autobiography, And The Walls Come Tumbling Down (Harper, 1989), which garnered criticism from other civil rights leaders for its revelations about the alleged extramarital affairs of Martin Luther King.

Further Reading

Ralph Abernathy's biography is And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (1991). The first published biography of Abernathy is Catherine M. Reef, Ralph David Abernathy (People in Focus Book) (1995). There is a substantial amount of biographical material about him in Stephen Oates' biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Let the Trumpet Sound (1982). Some information about Abernathy is also available in Flip Schulke, editor, Martin Luther King, Jr.; A Documentary … Montgomery to Memphis (1976) and in David J. Garrow, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1981). There is information about Abernathy in a publication by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference entitled The Poor People's Campaign, a Photographic Journal (1968).

minister (religion); civil rights leader

Personal Information

Born March 11, 1926, in Linden, AL; died of cardiac arrest, April 17, 1990, in Atlanta, GA; son of William L. (a farmer) and Louivery Valentine (Bell) Abernathy; married Juanita Odessa Jones, August 31, 1952; children: Juandalynn Ralpheda, Donzaleigh Avis, Ralph David III, Kwame Luthuli.
Education: Alabama State College (now Alabama State University), B.S., 1950; Atlanta University, M.A. in sociology, 1951.
Politics: Democrat.
Religion: Baptist.
Military/Wartime Service: Served in U.S. Army, beginning in 1944.
Memberships: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Atlanta Ministers Union, American Cancer Society, American Red Cross, Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), Kappa Alpha Psi, Phi Delta Kappa.

Career

Ordained Baptist minister, 1948; radio disc jockey, Montgomery, AL, 1950; Alabama State College, Montgomery, dean of men, 1951; First Baptist Church, Montgomery, pastor, 1951-61; West Hunter Street Baptist Church, Atlanta, GA, pastor, beginning 1961; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Atlanta, president, 1968-77, president emeritus, 1977--. Founder, Montgomery Improvement Association, 1955; co-founder, SCLC, 1957; leader, Poor People's Campaign, Resurrection City, Washington, DC, 1968; organizer and chairman, Operation Breadbasket, Atlanta; founder, Foundation for Economic Enterprises Development (FEED). Advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); participant in World Peace Concil presidential committee meeting, Santiago, Chile, 1972.

Life's Work

The Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, closest friend and adviser of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was also King's hand-picked successor as president of the clergy-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Abernathy became president of the SCLC after King's assassination in 1968 and continued the organization's nonviolent campaign for civil rights for blacks and other oppressed people in the United States. The alliance between Abernathy and King stretched back to the mid-1950s, when the two were Baptist ministers in Montgomery, Alabama, coordinating a boycott by local blacks to end segregation of the city's buses. The historic Montgomery Bus Boycott, which would come to mark the beginning of the modern-day Civil Rights Movement, thrust King into the national spotlight as the inspirational leader of a nonviolent struggle to desegregate the South, with Abernathy at his side as chief confidant and most trusted official.

"To a lot of people, King and Abernathy seemed an odd pair," wrote Stephen B. Oates in Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. "Largely northern educated and a scion of Atlanta's black middle class, King was learned, fastidious, and urbane. Abernathy, by contrast, came from a bucolic background and was so slow and earthy that some thought him crude." Both men, however, had mutual admiration for their accomplishments as ministers, and their styles complemented each other as leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. In a review of Abernathy's 1989 autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, Henry Hampton, executive producer of the award-winning civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize, commented in the New York Times Book Review: "Mr. Abernathy was known as the `other side' of Martin King, and there is much evidence that King could not have succeeded without him. Mr. Abernathy was earthy and outgoing, connecting to the rural masses in a way that King, especially in the early years, could not. His ease with poor and working-class people, joined with King's intellectual appeal to the middle class, made the pair a powerful magnet for a community that needed to overcome class differences."

Abernathy was born the tenth of twelve children on his family's farm in Linden, Alabama, in west-central rural Marengo County. Originally named David, he was nicknamed Ralph by one of his sisters after a favorite teacher. Growing up, Abernathy was strongly influenced by both his Christian parents. His father, William, a hardworking farmer and church deacon, owned a 500-acre self-sufficient farm and was respected by both blacks and whites in the community. Deeply committed to education, Abernathy's father served on the board of the local black high school, Linden Academy, and frequently made large financial donations to its operations. Abernathy aspired early on to become a preacher and his mother continually encouraged him in that ambition. As he noted in And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, "The preacher, after all, was the finest and most important person around, someone who was accorded respect wherever he went." Abernathy's father often impressed upon him that "Preaching is not a vocation for a boy but for a man" and "David, if you ever see a good fight, get in it--and win it."

After graduating from Linden Academy, Abernathy was drafted into the then-segregated U.S. Army, in which he served during the final months of World War II. He returned to Alabama after the war and enrolled in Montgomery's Alabama State College. A good student and natural leader, Abernathy was elected president of the student council and successfully led protests to obtain better cafeteria conditions and living quarters. Instead of drawing the wrath of school officials, however, Abernathy earned their respect and was later hired as the school's dean of men. Abernathy formally announced his calling as a Baptist minister in 1948; but he was also very interested in learning more about civil rights in his classes at Alabama State, a subject handled with much discretion by the faculty.

After graduation Abernathy worked during the summer of 1950 as a disc jockey at a white Montgomery radio station; he was the first black to do so. In the fall he enrolled at Atlanta University, where he received his masters degree in sociology. While in Atlanta, Abernathy had the opportunity to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., preach for the first time. The location was the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King's father had been minister for many years. Abernathy introduced himself to the young King, with whom he was very impressed. Abernathy recounted in his autobiography: "He was about my age, but already he had begun to build a reputation in a city the size of Atlanta. So I sat there burning with envy at his learning and confidence. Already he was a scholar; and while he didn't holler as loud as some of the more famous preachers I had heard, he could be loud enough when he wanted to. Even then I could tell he was a man with a special gift from God."

After obtaining his masters degree Abernathy returned to Alabama and worked part-time as minister for the Eastern Star Baptist Church in Demopolis, near his hometown of Linden. Abernathy was very popular with the congregation; under his stewardship Eastern Star became the most active church in Demopolis. About this time Abernathy also began substituting at one of Montgomery's leading black churches, First Baptist. When a permanent vacancy in the pulpit opened there, Abernathy, only 26 years old at the time, was named minister of the congregation. Three years later King accepted a call to another of Montgomery's leading black churches, Dexter Avenue Baptist, and he and Abernathy became close friends. The King and Abernathy families socialized together; the topic of conversation was frequently civil rights. Abernathy recalled in And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: "As Martin expounded philosophy, I saw its practical applications on the local level.... To use a military analogy, while he was talking about strategy (the broad, overall purpose of a campaign), I was thinking about tactics (how to achieve that strategy through specific actions)."

In 1955 a black seamstress from Montgomery named Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger, for which she was arrested and later fined. City buses in Montgomery, as was the case throughout the South, were segregated--black sections were in the back and reserved white seats were in the front. In between the two sections was an area in which blacks could sit, but they were required to move if there were white passengers without seats. Parks, tired after a long day at work, refused the order of the white bus driver to move from her seat, and was turned into the local police and arrested. The incident, though not the first of its kind in Montgomery, stood out in that Parks was a quiet and well-respected woman of the community who had served as secretary of the local branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

A local group called the Women's Political Council suggested a boycott by blacks of the city's buses, while King and Abernathy--both still in their twenties--moved to form what became known as the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). Through hurried meetings in their churches, Abernathy and King readily rallied the support of Montgomery blacks to boycott the segregated buses. The MIA, under King's principles of a nonviolent campaign, worked feverishly to coordinate the boycott. Announcements were made in black churches that blacks should stay off the buses. The city's black taxi companies were contacted to transport people; later a carpool was organized after the city ruled that the reduced fares charged by the taxi drivers were illegal. King, as the head of the MIA, and Abernathy, as program chief, became responsible for maintaining the momentum of the boycott within the scope of a nonviolent protest. "Martin's task was to teach them; mine was to move them to act--or rather not to act--in accordance with those principles," Abernathy noted. "So at each meeting I would take the pulpit to whip them into a fervor, exhorting them to remain true to our cause."

Despite numerous threats and other intimidation, the boycott persisted for over a year until the federal courts in June of 1956 upheld an injunction against the bus company's segregation policies. Having successfully led the rally against segregation in Montgomery, King was eager to push for civil rights for blacks in all areas of life. In January of 1957 King and Abernathy met in Atlanta with other Southern clergymen to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization of churches and civic groups that would lead nonviolent desegregation protests across the South. King was elected president of the SCLC and Abernathy its secretary-treasurer. While at the Atlanta meeting, Abernathy's home and First Baptist Church were bombed, in addition to other homes and churches in Montgomery. Abernathy's family barely escaped injury; the minister hurriedly returned to Montgomery to tend to his family and oversee the rebuilding of his church.

Later in 1957 King and Abernathy met with then-Vice-President Richard M. Nixon to petition Nixon and President Dwight D. Eisenhower to speak in the South on the importance of governmental compliance with the Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education ruling, which had outlawed segregation in public schools. In 1960 King moved to Atlanta to devote his full time to SCLC activities; a year later, at King's urging, Abernathy also moved and became pastor of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church. In the next few years King, Abernathy, and the SCLC led desegregation protest movements across the South, including marches, rallies, and sit-ins in cities like Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, Albany, Georgia, Greensboro, North Carolina, and St. Augustine, Florida. They were arrested numerous times; violence and threats against their lives became routine occurrences. In 1965 King named Abernathy vice-president at large of the SCLC, perhaps foreseeing the possibility that he might not be around forever to lead the organization.

In 1968 King--who was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike by city sanitation workers--was assassinated by a sniper as he stood on the balcony of his motel room. Abernathy was at King's side when he died. Later, SCLC board members unanimously named Abernathy leader of the organization. One of his first moves was to proceed with King's proposed Poor People's Campaign march on Washington, D.C. In 1968 Abernathy led a demonstration on the nation's capitol to protest for economic and civil rights for poor people and oversaw the construction of a shantytown called Resurrection City near the Lincoln Memorial. Resurrection City drew poor and homeless people from around the country. In May of 1968 Abernathy met with members of Congress to petition for help for the nation's unemployed and poor. He was later arrested when the group refused to move from the site after its demonstration permits had expired.

As president of the SCLC Abernathy led several other desegregation protests in the South, including a major one in Charleston, South Carolina. He resigned from the SCLC in 1977 and made an unsuccessful bid for the Georgia fifth district U.S. Congressional seat vacated by prominent black statesman Andrew Young. Undaunted, Abernathy formed an organization called Foundation for Economic Enterprises Development (FEED)--designed to help train blacks for better economic opportunities--and carried on his ministerial duties at West Hunter Street Baptist. In his later years Abernathy lectured across the United States, but was hampered at times by health problems.

In 1989 Abernathy's autobiography, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down, was criticized by some black leaders for the minister's inclusion of details regarding King's well-known extramarital affairs. Hampton questioned Abernathy's motives, suggesting jealousy and a smearing of the record. "Does it really add to the record or does it simply provide fodder for blaring headlines?" Hampton asked in his book review. Others rose to Abernathy's defense, however, stating that he had included information about King that was common knowledge, and that respectable biography should not censor facts, especially from Abernathy, who knew King best. Beyond this controversy And the Walls Came Tumbling Down is noteworthy, Hampton wrote, for being the story "of a man at the core of a great social movement." Hampton praised Abernathy's recounting of his own involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, noting that "his storytelling is gripping, even moving."

Awards

Awards: Numerous honorary degrees, including LL.D.s from Allen University, 1960, Southampton College and Long Island University, both 1969, and Alabama State University, 1974, and D.D.s from Morehouse College, 1971, and Kalamazoo College, 1978; Peace Medal, German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 1971.

Works

Writings

• And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography, Harper & Row, 1989.
• "The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association," from The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956, edited by David J. Garrow, Carlson, 1989.

Recordings

• Birmingham, Alabama, 1963: Mass Meeting, Folkway Records, 1980.
• The Sit-in Story, Folkway Records, 1961.

Further Reading

Books

• Abernathy, Ralph David, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography, Harper, 1989.
• Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Touchstone, 1988.
• Oates, Stephen B., Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., New American Library, 1982.
• Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement From the 1950s Through the 1980s, edited by Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer, with Sarah Flynn, Bantam, 1990.
• The Walking City: The Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955-1956, edited by David J. Garrow, Carlson, 1989.

Periodicals

• New York Post, April 13, 1968.
• New York Times, March 24, 1990.
• New York Times Book Review, October 29, 1989; November 26, 1989.

— Michael E. Mueller

For more information on Ralph David Abernathy, visit Britannica.com.

(ăb'ərnăth'ē) , 1926–90, American civil-rights leader, b. Linden, Ala. A Baptist minister, he helped Martin Luther King, Jr., organize the Montgomery bus boycott (1955). He was treasurer, vice president, and, after King's assassination (1968), president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). An advocate of nonviolence as a means to social change, he led the Poor People's Campaign on Washington, D.C., after King's death. He resigned from the SCLC in 1977.

Quotes:

"The industrial landscape is already littered with remains of once successful companies that could not adapt their strategic vision to altered conditions of competition."

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)