Ralph David Abernathy Sr. (; March 11, 1926 – April 17, 1990) was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. Being a leader of the civil rights movement, Abernathy was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. and collaborated with him and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led and co-created the Montgomery bus boycott and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Abernathy became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968 and led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., in addition to other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans. He also served as an advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
In 1971, Abernathy addressed the United Nations, speaking about world peace. He also assisted in brokering a deal between the FBI and American Indian Movement protesters during the Wounded Knee incident of 1973. Abernathy retired from his position as president of the SCLC in 1977 and became president emeritus. Later that year, he unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives for the 5th district of Georgia. Abernathy later founded the Foundation for Economic Enterprises Development (FEED), and he testified before the U.S. Congress in support of extending the Voting Rights Act in 1982.
In 1989, Abernathy wrote And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, a controversial autobiography about his and King's involvement in the civil rights movement. Abernathy eventually became less active in politics and returned to his work as a minister. Abernathy died of heart disease on April 17, 1990. His tombstone is engraved with the words "I tried."
Early life, family, and education
Abernathy, the 10th of William L. and Louivery Valentine Abernathy (née Bell)'s 12 children, was born on March 11, 1926, on their 500-acre (200 ha) family farm in Linden, Alabama. William was the first Black American to vote in Marengo County, Alabama, and the first to serve on a grand jury there. Abernathy attended Linden Academy (a Baptist school founded by the First Mt. Pleasant District Association). At Linden Academy, he led his first demonstrations to improve the livelihoods of his fellow students.
During World War II, Abernathy enlisted in the United States Army advancing in rank becoming platoon sergeant before being discharged. Afterwards, he enrolled at Alabama State University using the benefits from the G.I. Bill, which he earned with his service. As a sophomore, Abernathy was elected president of the student council, and led a successful hunger strike to raise the quality of the food served on the campus. While still a college student, he announced his call to the ministry, which Abernathy had envisioned since he was a small boy growing up in a devout Baptist family. Abernathy was ordained a Baptist minister in 1948 and preached his first sermon on Mother's Day (in honor of his recently deceased mother). Two years later, Abernathy graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. During the summer of 1950, he hosted a radio show and became the first African-American disc jockey on a white radio station in Montgomery, Alabama. In the fall, Abernathy went to Atlanta University earning a Master of Arts degree in sociology with high honors in 1951. While enrolled at Alabama State, he pledged becoming an initiated brother of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.
Abernathy began his professional career in 1951, when he was appointed as the dean of men at Alabama State University. Later that year, Abernathy became the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church, the largest Black church in Montgomery; he held the position for 10 years.
Abernathy married Juanita Odessa Jones of Uniontown, Alabama, on August 31, 1952. They had five children: Ralph David Abernathy Jr., Juandalynn Ralpheda, Donzaleigh Avis, Ralph David Abernathy III, and Kwame Luthuli Abernathy. Their first child, Ralph Jr., died suddenly on August 18, 1953, less than two days after his birth on August 16, while their other children lived on to adulthood. His grandson, Micah Abernathy, is currently an American football player for the Atlanta Falcons.
In 1954, Abernathy met Martin Luther King Jr., who was at that time becoming a pastor himself at a nearby church. Abernathy mentored King and they eventually became close friends.
After the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, Abernathy, then a member of the Montgomery NAACP, collaborated with King to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which organized the Montgomery bus boycott. Along with fellow English professor Jo Ann Robinson, they called for and distributed flyers asking the black citizens of Montgomery to stay off the buses. The boycott attracted national attention, and a federal court case that ended on December 17, 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Browder v. Gayle, upheld an earlier District Court decision that the bus segregation was unconstitutional. The 381-day transit boycott, challenging the "Jim Crow" segregation laws, had been successful. And on December 20, 1956, the boycott came to an end.
After the boycotts, Abernathy's home and church were bombed. His family were barely able to escape their home, but they were unharmed. Abernathy's church, Mt. Olive Church, Bell Street Church, and the home of Robert Graetz were also bombed on that evening, while King, Abernathy, and 58 other black leaders from the south were meeting at the Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, in Atlanta.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference and support of Freedom Riders
On January 11, 1957, after a two-day-long meeting, the Southern Leaders Conference on Transportation and Non-violent Integration was founded. On February 14, 1957, the conference convened again in New Orleans. During that meeting, they changed the group's name to the Southern Leadership Conference and appointed the following executive board: King, president; Charles Kenzie Steele, vice president; Abernathy, financial secretary-treasurer; T. J. Jemison, secretary; I. M. Augustine, general counsel. On August 8, 1957, the Southern Leadership Conference held its first convention, in Montgomery. They changed the conference's name a final time to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and decided to start voter registration drives for Black people across the south.
On May 20, 1961, the Freedom Riders stopped in Montgomery while on their way from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans to protest the still segregated buses across the south. Many of the Freedom Riders were beaten by a white mob once they arrived at the Montgomery bus station, causing several of the riders to be hospitalized. The following night Abernathy and King set up an event in support of the Freedom Riders, where King would make an address, at Abernathy's church. More than 1,500 people came to the event that night. The church was soon surrounded by a mob of white segregationists who laid siege on the church. King, from inside the church, called the Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and pleaded for help from the federal government. There was a group of United States Marshals sent there to protect the event, but they were too few in number to protect the church from the angry mob, who had begun throwing rocks and bricks through the windows of the church. Reinforcements with riot experience, from the Marshals service, were sent in to help defend the perimeter. By the next morning, the Governor of Alabama, after being called by Kennedy, sent in the Alabama National Guard, and the mob was finally dispersed. After the success of the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Huntsville, Alabama in 1961, King insisted that Abernathy assume the pastorate of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta; Abernathy moved his family from Montgomery becoming the pastor in 1962.