RALPH DAVID ABERNATHY
Oil, 1964,
30 x 24 inches
Ralph David Abernathy,
clergyman, was born in Alabama in 1926, and received his bachelor's
degree from Alabama State College, after having served in the
Army during the Second World War. He did his graduate work at
Atlanta University, and became a minister in Montgomery, where
he had as a colleague Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1955, he organized
the Montgomery Improvement Association, and a short time later,
he and King became known nationally because of their leadership
of the successful bus boycott. It was then that they organized
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, soon the nation's
leading advocate of nonviolence, resisted strenuously by militant
factions. Upon King's death, Abernathy succeeded him as president.
He organized the Poor People's Campaign in Washington where
Resurrection City was built, a group of huts in the center of
the nation's capital. He was jailed for twenty days for refusing
to obey the police order to remove the huts. He went on to organize
the SCLC Operation Breadbasket, to exert financial pressure against
companies that had poor records in extending equal opportunities
to blacks. In 1961 he had become pastor of an Atlanta church and
his honors came to include honorary degrees from such institutions
as Long Island University, Alabama State University, Morehouse
College, and Kalamazoo College. His autobiography is And the
Walls Came Tumbling Down, published in 1989.
LexisNexis shows some of the organizational
materials from the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.
