Ralph Abernathy was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s closest advisor during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. The two ministers began their friendship when King moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to become pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. They shared a belief in the social gospel, a theology that calls for social justice as well as salvation. They also viewed nonviolent direct action as a means for achieving racial equality in the United States. When the Montgomery bus boycott began in December 1955, Abernathy helped King direct the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and later form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Describing his relationship with King, Abernathy wrote, “As long as he was our leader, I gave him my complete and unqualified support in meetings and with others. If I had any reservations about what he was planning to do, I expressed them only when the two of us were together. We were a team, and each of us was severely crippled without the other. That is why I stuck so close to him during those years.”
Born in 1926 on a farm in Linden, Alabama, Abernathy was the tenth of twelve children. Before completing high school, he served in the U.S. army during World War II. In 1948, Abernathy was ordained as a Baptist minister and graduated from Alabama State University two years later with a B.S. in mathematics. In 1952, after earning a master's degree in sociology at Atlanta University, he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery.
As a prominent minister and chairman of the MIA’s executive committee, Abernathy was a leading figure during the Montgomery bus boycott. Described by King as a “persuasive and dynamic” speaker “with the gift of laughing people into positive action,” Abernathy energized Montgomery's mass meetings. When the civil rights movement gained momentum following the success of the boycott, Abernathy became King’s chief aide, serving as secretary and treasurer of the SCLC and standing beside King at marches and demonstrations. Between 1961 and 1965, Abernathy was jailed with King nineteen times during campaigns in Albany, Birmingham, Selma, and St. Augustine. In 1966, when the SCLC turned its focus to northern cities, Abernathy helped King direct the Chicago freedom movement.
After King’s assassination on 4 April 1968, Abernathy became president of the SCLC. On 8 April, he led 20,000 silent marchers through the streets of Memphis to honor King and to support the Memphis Sanitation Worker’s Strike. The following month, Abernathy directed the Poor People’s Campaign, the last major demonstration planned by King and the SCLC.
After resigning from the SCLC leadership in 1977, Abernathy made an unsuccessful bid for Congress. In 1989, he published his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. Soon after retiring from Atlanta’s West Hunter Street Baptist Church, where he served as pastor from 1961 to 1990, Abernathy died at the age of 64.