#KappaHistoryIsBlackHistory
Rev. Ralph Abernathy (1948 initiate of the Beta Zeta of Kappa Alpha Psi) was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond.
As the young pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, he and Martin Luther King, Jr. were among the leaders of the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in response to the arrest of Rosa Parks.
In 1961, Abernathy’s First Baptist Church was the site of the May 21 “siege,” where an angry mob of white segregationists surrounded 1,500 people inside the sanctuary. At one point, the situation seemed so dire that Abernathy and King considered giving themselves up to the mob to save the sanctuary’s men, women, and children.
On May 25, Abernathy was arrested on breach of peace charges after escorting William Sloane Coffin’s Connecticut Freedom Ride to the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Terminal, neither the first nor the last instance of civil disobedience in a lifetime of activism.
After Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Abernathy took up the leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Poor People’s Campaign and led the 1968 March on Washington. Ralph Abernathy died in 1990.
Kevin Scott
Grand Historian
