Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 18, 1990 TAG: 9004180507
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/2 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: Medium
Abernathy died Tuesday at Crawford Long Hospital while being prepared for a lung scan to locate a suspected blood clot, hospital spokeswoman Tisha Burland said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
As King's chief lieutenant, Abernathy was at his side at almost every key battle of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s and took his place as leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after King's 1968 assassination. But the fame and adulation enjoyed by King never quite extended to Abernathy.
In a 1986 interview, he lamented that during a visit to a school in Connecticut, "not a single student knew who I was."
In 1989 he was reviled as a traitor to the cause for writing about King's alleged marital infidelity in his autobiography, "And The Walls Came Tumbling Down." Abernathy wrote that King spent time with two women and had a violent argument with one in the 24 hours before his assassination.
King's widow, Coretta Scott King, was among those who praised Abernathy on Tuesday. She issued a statement from Zimbabwe, where she was attending celebrations of that country's 10th anniversary of independence.
"When our home was bombed and our lives were threatened, he was there," she said. "His strength as a tactician and a counselor to Martin during our struggle has been eloquently recorded in Martin's own writings and in the annals of the American civil rights movement."
King's son, Fulton County Commissioner Martin Luther King III, called Abernathy's death "a very tragic loss to our nation."
President Bush hailed Abernathy as "a great leader in the struggle for civil rights for all Americans and a tireless campaigner for justice."
The Rev. Joseph Lowery, who succeeded Abernathy as president of the SCLC, described Abernathy on Tuesday as "a faithful servant of the cause of liberty and justice."
Abernathy had been in the hospital since March 23 for treatment of a sodium deficiency and had suffered strokes in 1983 and 1986. At the time of his death he was pastor of West Hunter Street Baptist Church.
Abernathy, who was the son of a farmer, joined King in 1955 to lead the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott that lifted King to national fame. For the next 13 years King and Abernathy were virtually inseparable.
"We were known as the civil rights twins," Abernathy once said. "We always sought to complement each other. I never tried to be a copy of him and he never tried to be a copy of me."
They co-founded the SCLC in 1957, and Abernathy was in a nearby cell when King wrote his famous "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" in 1963, setting forth the goals of their movement.
Later that year, Abernathy was at King's side for the "I Have a Dream" speech that climaxed the march on Washington, the biggest demonstration in U.S. history. He was in Sweden when King received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and the two led the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965.
And on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tenn., Abernathy took King's bloody head in his hands moments after an assassin's bullet cut him down.
But in his autobiography, Abernathy said he felt other King aides saw him as "no more than an appendage to Martin . . . who never played an important role."
King had directed that Abernathy succeed him at the SCLC despite Abernathy's reluctance. Abernathy led the 1968 Poor People's Campaign that brought thousands to Washington. But the SCLC lost its leadership role in the civil rights movement as key aides such as Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson left to follow their own paths.
by CNB