Army at the end of World War II. Although he saw no actual combat, he witnessed its violence, destruction, and devastation. It was a life defining experience:. At first the sight of maimed and bloodied bodies makes me weak and faint.
Later, I find it does not affect me physically; but I still feel a sickness at heart. Abernathy attended Alabama State University on the GI Bill, and while in school experienced first-hand the difficulty of registering to vote when forced to take a four-page literacy test, and told to recite the 13th Amendment of the Constitution.
As a student, he learned his first lessons in planning protests when he organized efforts to improve housing accommodations and the quality of meals on campus. The college administration conceded on both issues. Abernathy recounts the importance of this first success: This experience taught me a lesson that I filed away but never quite forgot: You can deal with the most awesome authority on an equal basis if the people are on your side.
In , at the age of twenty-six, Abernathy accepted the position of pastor at the historic First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He soon settled down and married Juanita Odessa Jones on August 13, to whom he had become a close friend with while attending Alabama State. A few years later, Abernathy again met King, who was under consideration for pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.
King was offered the position and moved his family to Montgomery. The wheels of destiny were then literally set in motion in Montgomery on December 1, when the normally courteous and soft-spoken Rosa Parks, tired after a long day of work, and tired of giving in to the humiliation of segregation, was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP was founded in in part as a response to the failings of Reconstruction after the end of the Civil War and the subsequent disenfranchisement of freed blacks throughout the South.
It operated as the dominant civil right protest organization prior to the civil rights movement. It was a Northern-based, bureaucratic organization founded by a group of black and white intellectuals to specifically fight for black Americans. The black founders, including W E. Dubois, were highly educated individuals. The main tactics used by the NAACP was legal action in nature, and highly dependent upon individuals bringing complaints to them that they could then forward to the United States Attorney General.
During these years, progress was slow and difficult because the U. Justice Department was avoiding enforcement of any of the civil rights statutes brought forward by African Americans.
This began to change through the s when prosecutions of lynch mob members occurred for the first time in American history. Board of Education case, where the U.
Supreme Court unanimously determined unconstitutional the State of Kansas statutes that established separate public schools for black and white students. We talked about the oppression of our people and about the growing belief that a sea of change was taking place. We all agreed that Brown versus Board of Education had altered forever the conditions on which the continuing struggle would be predicated.
No longer was the law unambiguously on the side of Jim Crow. It now appeared as if the law was on our side, that the federal government might eventually be pressed into service in our fight for freedom. The Civil Rights March on Washington of where over , people, black and white, from every state in America peacefully gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial was actually envisioned decades earlier by Asa Philip Randolph.
Roosevelt to bring an end to racism in the United States Government:. Today we call upon President Roosevelt, a great humanitarian and idealist, to follow in the footsteps of his noble and illustrious predecessor and take the second decisive step in this world and national emergency and free American Negro citizens of the stigma, humiliation and insult of discrimination and Jim-Crowism in Government departments and national defense.
The Federal Government cannot with a clear conscience call upon private industry and labor unions to abolish discrimination based upon race or color as long as it practices discrimination itself against Negro Americans. He was working on a two-day demonstration; the first day devoted to a march on Capitol Hill; the second day to a mass meeting on the Mall where a number of people would speak — civil rights leaders, sympathetic legislators, perhaps the president himself… Though Philip Randolph was the most important single figure involved in the planning, the leaders of ten organizations were principally responsible for the final shape of the event.
As effective as the NAACP was on the legal front in the fight against racism, it had little reach into the American South where the most egregious of civil rights abuses occurred. As the NAACP expanded into the South it naturally tapped into the extensive network of black ministers and churches already in place there. The NAACP was particularly important in providing opportunities for local leaders [in the South] to acquire organizing skills and develop networks through which resources could be pooled.
The NAACP set the stage from which most of the leadership of the modern civil rights movement would emerge. The power of the churches and its ministers in the South to reach the black masses could be found in its grassroots nature. Ministers typically grew up and lived among the people and a common church culture developed throughout the region as a result.
This structure allowed for the efficient transmission of information to parishioners as the civil rights movement took hold. Use of the black churches and their close ties black colleges and universities were also key to the emergence of the leadership against segregation in the South. While attending college he was elected president of the student council and led successful protests for better cafeteria conditions and living quarters.
He earned the respect of both students and administrators, and he was later hired as the school's dean of men. Before obtaining his first degree, Abernathy was ordained as a Baptist minister and, after completing his education, served as minister at the Eastern star Baptist church in Demopolis, near his home town of Linden. When he was 26 he accepted a position as full time minister at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
During this time King and Abernathy became close friends. In an African American seamstress from Montgomery named Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger and she was arrested and later fined.
This began an important historic phase of the civil rights movement. Through hurried meetings in their churches ministers, along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP , began a boycott of the city busses until all African Americans were assured better treatment.
The ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association MIA —a name suggested by Abernathy—to coordinate the boycott and voted a young minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When the city government declared that practice illegal, those with cars formed carpools so that the boycotters wouldn't have to return to the busses. After days, the boycott was over and the busses were completely desegregated, a decision enforced by a United States district court.
All places have stories to tell — my role at WWC is to work with students to find creative and effective ways of helping those stories be told. Warren Wilson students crave a challenge. He encouraged his friend Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Parks had defied segregation laws by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Soon Abernathy and King emerged as leaders of the successful day Montgomery Bus Boycott, which forced the integration of the city's public transportation.
That landmark victory catapulted the two men to the forefront of the national Civil Rights Movement.
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