ralph abernathy – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

I have talked about this before: possibly the most consistent aspect of my teaching career has been my weekly trivia question. It’s had a few different incarnations over the years, but the way it usually works is that I post a question on Monday and, for those who choose to participate, an answer is due by the end of the school day on Thursday. Anyone who gets it right gets a piece of chocolate or a Jolly Rancher or something similar on Friday. No one has to participate; it’s purely for an excuse to hand out candy.

The kids can find the answer to the question any way they want, including ways that might be considered cheating in other contexts. The only rule is that I will not tell them the right answer or confirm that their answer is right. They can look answers up however they want, they can ask each other— every so often I will seed a completely ridiculous answer to see how far I can get it to spread— or they can ask other teachers or staff members. Everything’s legal.

The picture above is not the exact same picture I used— it’s the same march, from a slightly different angle— but I can’t find a high-res version right now to use on the site, and the exact picture doesn’t really matter all that much anyway. The question is “Name any two people in this picture.” Which, okay, isn’t exactly trivia, but whatever, my game my rules.

Martin Luther King, obviously, is a gimme, although my students have shown the annoying habit of deciding any Black man in a black-and-white photo is King regardless of whether he looks anything like him. So they really only have to identify one other person, and the fact that King is linked arm-in-arm with the woman next to him (who has “Not Rosa Parks!” written in my handwriting underneath her) is kind of a hint as to who she might be.

Anyway, one of my girls turned in an answer on a half-sheet of paper. She wrote “Coretta Scott King” at the top of the paper, “Martin Luther King, Jr.” in the middle of the paper, and her own name— kind of important if you want your candy— at the bottom. Relevant: she is Latina and has a very obviously Latina name.

As I was going through the answers this afternoon, I discovered that one of my students in a different class period had obviously fished her paper out of the basket they get turned into and copied her answer. Now, again, technically this isn’t cheating. It’s kinda gross, but it’s not cheating. However, he’s not getting any candy tomorrow.

Why not? And how do I know his answer was copied from hers, specifically? Take a moment and think about it. See if you can come up with the reason. It’s cool, I’ll watch a video while you’re thinking about it:

This young man also wrote three names on his piece of paper. At the top was Martin Luther King, Jr. At the bottom was his name. And the third name? The one in the middle? Was the name of my other student, in all her Mexican glory. A fellow student in his grade at his school.

Now, I warn them: they can find out the answer however they want, but if I get an answer that I think betrays an exceptional lack of thought being put into the process, I reserve the right to make fun of them the next day. Usually this happens when I have a question beginning with the words “Which President …” and get someone who was never President as an answer.

I will have a grand fucking time mocking this answer tomorrow, I tell you.

(Also, left to right: Bayard Rustin (in the stocking cap), Philip Randolph, John Lewis, Ralph Abernathy, Ruth Harris Bunche, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther King Jr, Coretta Scott King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Hosea Williams in the dark coat with the child in front of him. I recognized Randolph, Lewis, Abernathy and both Kings without looking them up, and I’m kind of embarrassed that I didn’t recognize Rustin.)

Dr.-Martin-Luther-King-Jr.-and-Rev.-Ralph-Abernathy.jpg You may not be aware of who Rev. Ralph David Abernathy is, but I guarantee you know his face. Why? He’s the guy standing just behind or just to the side of Martin Luther King, Jr. in every picture of Martin Luther King ever taken. In many ways he was as influential to the civil rights movement as King was– he was even the guy who brought King in as the visible face of the movement during the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, which was what made MLK a national figure– but because he was so often quite literally the guy behind the guy he’s not nearly as well known.

I just finished his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, a book I have owned for a while and really should have read a long, long time ago. It’s one of the more interesting autobiographies I’ve ever read. For example, here is the cover blurb:

The detail Mr. Abernathy offers about his life with Martin Luther King Jr. is enlightening and helps us understand what a remarkable man King was.

You catch that? It’s Abernathy’s book, about Abernathy, but even the blurb on the cover is about King. So the book needs to be read on a few different levels: one, as an autobiography, two, as a biography of an entirely different person, and three, as a history of the Civil Rights movement, and specifically the Southern Christian Leadership Coalition, which King was President of and which Abernathy took over (at King’s explicit direction) after King was killed.

The ultimate result is a book that is most successful at item 3, I think, and, oddly, is weakest at item 1. Abernathy discusses his early life carefully enough, I suppose, and you get a good picture of what growing up in Alabama in the thirties must have been like, although he’s careful to note that he was more privileged than most. Once the SCLC enters the picture, though, any mention of Abernathy’s family or private life (or even his pastorship outside the SCLC) disappears. The births of three of his four children go unmentioned, for example, and while his wife Juanita is present throughout the book she’s mostly there, along with Coretta Scott King, as a provider of home-cooked meals.

The book functions best, as I said, as a history of the major struggles of the SCLC, with one major caveat: Abernathy, and it hurts me to say this because of who he was, was apparently a bit of a pompous ass. There are a number of other important figures throughout the movement who Abernathy clearly loathed, and some, such as Stokely Carmichael, endure abuse virtually every time they are mentioned. Jesse Jackson has an entire chapter that, other than the final page, is wholly dedicated to how egotistical he was. He treats the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee like it was overrun with Black Panthers from day one, which is manifestly untrue, yet neglects to mention the actual beginning of the black power movement, which he was present for. Most amazingly, Abernathy managed to write an entire chapter about the March on Washington without mentioning Bayard Rustin.

There would not have been a March on Washington without Bayard Rustin, and his omission is shocking. I can only assume that Abernathy disapproved of Rustin being openly gay, because otherwise he should have popped up way more often. With Carmichael and Jackson, the differences were more clearly personal.

And then there’s the way he treats MLK, and that for me is both the worst and most interesting parts of the book. Here’s the thing: Martin Luther King was not the perfect saint that modern media wants him portrayed as. He was, as I’ve said before, human. And he was, unfortunately, among many, many other things, the vast majority of them good, a philanderer.

Now: if you’re writing a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., you owe it to him and to your audience to not treat him as an unassailable, perfect person, and I think King himself would agree with that. An biography of King, at least one intended for grown-ups to read, should deal with the man’s darker side.

But if your book is about you, and you were Martin Luther King’s best friend and constant companion through the most important years of his life, and if you were literally the last human person he touched and saw and tried to speak to before the assassin’s bullet took his life, maybe, just maybe you don’t devote a chunk of the chapter about the night he was killed to the fact that he slept with as many as three different women during the couple of nights before the assassination. Maybe you leave that detail out. Maybe you don’t devote several pages to it. Just maybe.

It comes off kinda fucked up, is what I’m saying.

So, yeah: make no mistake, Ralph Abernathy was a pompous ass and one of the ways he uses this book is to settle some scores, and he occasionally takes some credit for things he wasn’t entirely responsible for, and I can’t help but think that I think some residual jealousy toward King was informing the way he wrote about the last few days of MLK’s life. But I’m not star-rating Ralph Abernathy, and again, the man is allowed to be human, and the good he did in life far, far outweighs spreading some vitriol around in the autobiography he wrote the year before he died (and, possibly relevantly, after having had at least two minor strokes.) As a book, AND THE WALLS CAME TUMBLING DOWN is fascinating, and any student of the Civil Rights Movement should have already read it.

Five stars.