Ralph Abernathy

Ralph David Abernathy was born on March 11, 1926, in the Hopewell Community near Linden, in Marengo County, Alabama, the tenth of the twelve children of William L. and Louivery Valentine Abernathy. His family were not tenants but landowners, working a five-hundred-acre farm that gave them a rare measure of independence in the segregated Black Belt. His father, William, was the first African American to vote in Marengo County and the first to sit on a grand jury there — a legacy of dignity Ralph carried all his life.

After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Abernathy earned a degree in mathematics from Alabama State College in 1950, having been ordained a Baptist minister in 1948. He soon became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, where his friendship with a young Martin Luther King Jr. would help shape a movement. Together they built the Montgomery Improvement Association and led the 1955–56 bus boycott that announced a new era.

In 1957 Abernathy stood among the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, serving as its secretary-treasurer while King led as president. For more than a decade he was King's closest confidant and companion in struggle. After King's assassination in 1968, Abernathy became president of the SCLC and carried forward the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, leading the movement until he stepped down in 1977.

He gave his voice to the disenfranchised until his death on April 17, 1990, in Atlanta. Let it be remembered that Ralph David Abernathy walked beside the mountaintop and kept faith with the poor — an honored steward of a people's long march toward justice.