ABERNATHY, RALPH DAVID

ABERNATHY, RALPH DAVID Prominent civil rights leader and Baptist minister, Ralph David Abernathy, was born in Linden, Alabama in 1926. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, then graduated from Alabama State College, subsequently doing his graduate work at Atlanta University. Abernathy and Martin Luther King, Jr. organized the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Following the successful boycott, Abernathy and King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which quickly became the leading edge of the "black nonviolence movement" in the United States. Like King, Abernathy preached nonviolence as a means of attaining social change. Following King's death, he led the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. Ralph Abernathy died in 1990. His autobiography is entitled And the Walls Came Tumbling Down (1989).