Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,055

Inside this cemetery office lies the grave of Ralph Abernathy. I’ll explain why I couldn’t actually see the grave at the end of the post.

Born in 1928 in Linden, Alabama, Abernathy grew up pretty well off. It’s worth remembering that in most of the South, a few Black people could vote. That included Abernathy’s father, who was also the first Black person to sit on a grand jury in that county since Reconstruction. Whites just made sure their numbers would be too small to matter. Abernathy was a good student and always interested in fighting for rights, including leading school protests against bad conditions at the academy which he attended for high school. He joined the Army in World War II and was a platoon sergeant by the end of the war.

After the war, Abernathy used his GI Bill benefits to enroll at Alabama State University. He led a hunger strike to improve the quality of food in student cafeterias. I should teach my students this fact. He decided to go into the ministry and became a Baptist minister, though his degree was in mathematics. But he had other interests too. He became the first Black DJ on a white radio station in Montgomery in 1950. He also decided on a master’s degree in sociology, which he got at Atlanta University in 1951. So this is a real interesting guy.

He went back to Alabama State in 1951, where he was named Dean of Men (I guess this is a precursor to the Dean of Students today but for one gender only) and also got his first church. He and Martin Luther King got to know each other in 1954, when the latter came to Montgomery to preach at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The next year, Rosa Parks decided to not leave her seat on the bus. Now, let’s be clear, no one selected King as the spokesman of the movement because he was MARTIN LUTHER KING. Nope, it’s that the Montgomery civil rights community–very active and long-standing–had so many internal divisions that the new smart guy seemed good. And that’s it. Well, it worked out. Abernathy was only a few years older than King and was part of the new generation too. He and Jo Ann Robinson were the real organizers of the boycott on the ground. This of course threatened all their lives. Abernathy’s home and church were bombed. His family escaped being murdered (he was in Atlanta at the time) but not by much.

After Montgomery, King decided to create the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organize the ministers’ side of the civil rights movement. King was of course a superstar now. He needed a strong right hand man. That was Ralph Abernathy. Initially, he was named secretary-treasurer of the SCLC but he effectively ran the organization for many of these years. Now, he was a good man and a solid organizer. But Abernathy was not the vision guy. In fact, from the beginning, he couldn’t understand why King wanted Septima Clark on the executive board of the SCLC. That’s not because she wasn’t competent. It’s because he didn’t see why you’d have a woman with any voice in the movement. Given that King was pretty far from a feminist, this gives you a sense of where Abertnathy and, quite honestly, most of the men in the civil rights leadership were.

But let’s not get too negative here. Abernathy would play a major, if ultimately supporting role, for decades. He was there giving speeches, organizing, and getting arrested in Birmingham and Selma. When the Freedom Riders were bombed in Montgomery, Abernathy did a ton of the work to support them and publicize what had happened. It was at Abernathy’s church in Montgomery where the giant Freedom Rider demonstration took with 1,500 people inside that the white mob surrounded and stayed until Kennedy forced George Wallace, against his will, to use the National Guard to disperse them. They all could have easily died that night. After this, King convinced Abernathy that it was simply not safe for him to have a church in Montgomery anymore and had him move to Atlanta.

Abernathy wasn’t a superstar and he really didn’t want to be one. Andrew Young later said of him who did ”a silent labor that was very much needed” in a movement of big personalities and that Abernathy was a loving, fun guy.

Abernathy generally supported King’s move against the Vietnam War, even if that meant alienating Lyndon Johnson. Much of the SCLC did not support King here. He was in the hotel room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when King was assassinated in 1968. He rode with King to the hospital, where the latter was declared dead. Having holding King’s head as he bled and watching him die, Abernathy then organized the funeral and delivered the eulogy. That’s a lot, an unimaginable amount of lot.

After King’s assassination, Abernathy became SCLC president. But it wasn’t going to be the same. Abernathy tried. He took on King’s Poor Persons Campaign and did the work with activists from other races to create a multiracial march, but without King, it just wasn’t the same. Abernathy didn’t have that particular kind of charisma and leadership that King had that could pull this off. Abernathy led a big protest against NASA during the launch of Apollo 11, saying that landing a man on the moon was a stupid waste of money when poverty still existed, which is of course 100% correct. He worked to negotiate the end of the Wounded Knee standoff in 1973 between members of the American Indian Movement and the FBI as well. That’s all great. It’s really really. hard to not be Martin Luther King and it’s so unfair to compare them and yet, you have to when discussing Abernathy. By 1977, Abernathy was out at the SCLC. It was driftless, debt-ridden, and out of touch with where Black politics had gone. Abernathy tried to run for Congress the year before, but had lost.

Abernathy got dumb too. He hated Jimmy Carter so much–and to be fair, anyone to the left of center hated Jimmy Carter by 1980–that not only did he endorse Ted Kennedy in the primary (fine) but he then endorsed Ronald Reagan in the general election, saying that Carter had completely turned his back on Black folks. Given the defensiveness among liberals about Carter, it really is worth going back to the time and the level of absolute betrayal people in every leftist movement (except for environmentalism) felt toward Carter by 1980. This was, of course, an idiotic endorsement by Abernathy. But don’t think it would have been impossible for King to have done the same thing that fall had he lived, though Coretta Scott King was horrified. Abernathy’s argument was that Reagan’s people told him there would be a lot of top-ranking Black appointees. There were not. To say the least, Abernathy did not repeat said endorsement in 1984. But it is a lesson for Democrats–DON’T TAKE YOUR CORE CONSTITUENCIES FOR GRANTED TO CHASE THE RIGHT. But Abernathy also got caught up with the Unification Church. The Moonies hired him as a spokesperson, served on some boards, etc. I think this was about Abernathy’s general dislike of religious persecution.

In 1989, Abernathy wrote his autobiography. In it, he discussed openly King’s many martial infidelities and that King had sex with two women the night before his assassination. Jesse Jackson among others were outraged, called it slander, etc. Hard to know. Not the best last years for Abernathy though. He died in 1990, from blood clots. He was 64 years old.

Ralph Abernathy is buried in Lincoln Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia. He’s inside the funeral parlor, in the room where they hold services. I’ve been twice. The first time, it was locked and the second time, there was a service going on. So I wasn’t exactly going to go into the middle of a funeral to take a picture. There are pictures online, this is good enough,

If you would like this series to visit other leaders of the civil rights movement, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Septima Clark is in Charleston, South Carolina and James Bevel is in Eutaw, Alabama. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.