Ralph David Abernathy Sr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. He was ordained in the Baptist tradition in 1948. As a leader of the civil rights movement, he was a close friend and mentor of Martin Luther King Jr. He collaborated with King and E. D. Nixon to create the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to the Montgomery bus boycott and co-created and was an executive board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He became president of the SCLC following the assassination of King in 1968; he led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C., as well as other marches and demonstrations for disenfranchised Americans. He also served as an advisory committee member of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE).
Abernathy in 1968
Abernathy and his wife Juanita Abernathy with Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta Scott King The Abernathy children are shown in the front line, leading the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965
Abernathy as painted by the artist Robert Templeton, oil, 1974
Ralph David Abernathy Home on the campus of Alabama State University in Montgomery
The civil rights movement was a social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
The 1963 March on Washington participants and leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial
13th Amendment in the National Archives, bearing the signature of Abraham Lincoln
The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909
Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.