Who is our leader?" shouts the crowd at Resurrection City. "Ab-er-nath-y," comes the chanted rejoinder. All across the country, as he seeks to raise funds and fervor for his Poor People's Campaign in Wash ington, Ralph David Abernathy, 42, hears the same cry. Less than two months after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the new president of the Southern. Christian Leadership Conference is doing his best to dispel doubts about S.C.L.C.'s ability to carry on. "You can kill the dreamer," he repeatedly tells audiences, "but you can't kill the dream."
As one of King's chief lieutenants for more than a decade, Abernathy has staked out a claim as custodian of the dream. Whether that claim will go unchallenged remains to be seen. Far less cerebral than his predecessor, he has shown an unhappy tendency to make inept remarks and to accept bad advice from ultramilitant S.C.L.C. officials whom King managed to keep in line.
Affluence in Alabama
Though Abernathy recently claimed his father was born a slave and earned but a slave's wages, his family was better off than that. They owned 500 acres in Linden, Ala., and prospered even during the Depression. Ralph—tenth of twelve children—was expected to help work the farm, but, says his wife Juanita, "He was just too awkward at farm work and never learned to do it."
Drafted into the Army during World War II, Abernathy used his G.I. bill to attend Alabama State College, graduating in 1950 with honors in sociology. He stayed on to teach history and counsel students, and took up preaching for $40 a Sunday at a tiny church in Demopolis. His gutbucket style gained him quick recognition, and in 1951 he was named pastor of the First Baptist Church of Montgomery, where he also joined the N.A.A.C.P. He approached civil rights with the same intensity as he did the Bible. So it was not surprising that he got the first call for help after Mrs. Rosa Parks, a Negro seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus in 1955, thereby launching the most protracted—and successful—nonviolent protest in American history.
Jail with Martin
Abernathy telephoned King, and together the two ministers marshaled a 382-day boycott that eventually caused the bus company to relent. It was about this time that Abernathy first tasted violence. At 2:10 on a January morning in 1957, the front of his house was dynamited, fortunately injuring no one inside.
In 1961 the Abernathys took their two daughters and a son to Atlanta, where Ralph became pastor of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church and secretary-treasurer of King's S.C.L.C. While King, with his soaring eloquence and philosophical moorings emerged as the country's leading civil rights figure, Abernathy became the whip of the movement, and his humor and gift for mediation were invaluable. "When we were in jail," recalls Wyatt Tee Walker, once executive director of the S.C.L.C. and now aide to Nelson Rockefeller, "he would organize things, like appointing a cleanup detail. Martin would never go to jail without him." Abernathy was jailed 19 times with his leader. In appreciation of his fidelity, King named Abernathy as his successor three years ago.