Joins the Civil Rights Movement

In 1955 Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, moved to Montgomery where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Abernathy and King began working together. Though they both had heavy pastoral responsibilities, they tried to meet for dinner every day to talk and make plans. During these conversations the civil rights movement took shape. In December of the same year they suddenly found themselves at the center of the Rosa Parks controversy. The men formulated plans to turn Montgomery into a model of social justice and racial harmony. Using the principles of passive resistance promoted by Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, Abernathy and King decided that the implementation would be completely nonviolent.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus and thus set events in motion that led to the Montgomery bus boycott. Hers was not the first refusal to obey a bus driver’s orders, for two black women had already been arrested earlier in the year for doing so. One of them, a fifteen-year-old student, had been dragged from the bus and charged with assault and battery as well as failure to comply with laws governing public transportation. What made the arrest and media coverage of Rosa Parks so significant was Parks’ own appearance and demeanor. She was soft-spoken and courteous, a slight woman who worked as a seamstress at a large department store. She had an air of gentility about her that usually evoked respect from whites and blacks alike. No one imagined that she could end up in jail, but that is precisely what happened. Word quickly spread of Parks’ arrest. Jo Ann Robinson, who had been instrumental in assisting the other two women who were arrested, was already preparing to hand out leaflets for the boycott. Abernathy joined in handing out leaflets to the black community.

On Friday evening at a quickly planned citywide meeting the black community agreed to support a boycott. On the following Monday morning empty buses drove their routes. The boycott was working. On Monday evening Abernathy and King were further surprised to find that their planned meeting had attracted thousands, all cheering to the strength and power of their unity. The boycott’s success made them realize they needed to organize to be more effective and to include supportive non-blacks as well. That evening the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed.

In January 1956 King’s home was bombed and in December of that year Abernathy’s home was bombed. On that same night in December someone also bombed his church. In the midst of this agitation, Abernathy and King and their wives had been working to form a region-wide organization that would extend the influence of the Montgomery Improvement Association. After these bombings King went to New Orleans in order to form a new group, which was called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Through their leadership in this organization, Abernathy and King became known as the “civil rights twins.” Abernathy was respected and honored as one of the two vanguards of the civil rights era.

As a black Baptist preacher, Abernathy believed in a new social gospel that many thought was both radical and worldly. He had visions in which black Americans would win their freedom and exercise all the rights and privileges of that freedom. As a leader, he was willing to take life-threatening risks to achieve unimagined victories for black Americans. His sermons were not scholarly discourses written in lofty language. Rather, they were delivered in simple language full of folk sayings and anecdotes reminiscent of his rural upbringings.

After King’s assassination in 1968, Abernathy assumed the leadership position of the organization they had both formed together, SCLC. He was elected president without reservation. In the spring of 1968 he led the Poor People’s Campaign which brought thousands of poor people to Washington, D.C., and focused the nation’s attention on the ugly reality of hunger and poverty. He worked to improve the living wage and working conditions to thousands of hospital workers in the nation. In 1977 he resigned his position as president of SCLC due to lack of financial stability of the organization.

Abernathy received more than three hundred honors, including the Man of the Year Award from the Atlanta Urban League, the Unheralded Hero of Human Rights from the YMCA, the Peace Medallion of the German Democratic Baptist Churches, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was also the recipient of twenty-seven honorary doctorate degrees.

In January 1970 he traveled to Europe and South America. In Scandinavia he talked of his own vision of eventual oneness of all poor and dark-skinned people of the world. One month after returning from Europe he flew to Panama and Brazil. In Brazil he called for an international movement to eradicate racism, poverty, and war. In 1971 he traveled to Moscow State University in the Soviet Union to promote, world peace and understanding and to promote nonviolence.

In 1989, after more than thirty years in the struggle in the civil rights movement, Abernathy wrote his autobiography, And The Walls Came Tumbling Down . He had two reasons for writing this book: to describe life under the Jim Crow laws and to describe the civil rights movement.

Abernathy’s leadership in the movement, along with that of Martin Luther King Jr., ranks him at the top of a list of those who led boycotts and marches through many hostile segregated U.S. cities, Montgomery, Selma, and Birmingham, Alabama; Albany, Georgia, and Chicago, to gain equal justice for African Americans during and following the civil rights era. On April 17, 1990, Ralph David Abernathy died while being treated for a heart attack. He and his wife had four children: Juandalyn Ralpheda, Donzaleigh Avis, Ralph David III, and Kwame Luthuli.