No one else experienced it all, so no one else can really tell the whole story from the viewpoint of an eyewitness.” And Abernathy is well aware that he is telling some things others believe should be passed over in silence. “I was there from beginning to end,” he writes, “from the Montgomery bus boycott in the late autumn of 1955 to Memphis in the spring of 1968 to Washington in 1988. Of course, the story of Ralph David Abernathy is, in largest part, a story of the movement. Abernathy’s work deserves an honored place in this company even though it is a different sort of book: an autobiography written with sometimes embarrassing candor and an almost painful ingenuousness.
In the last few years we have been given several books combining the biography of King and the history of the civil-rights movement, notably David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross and Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters. He has insisted, instead, that he is Joshua to King’s Moses in the biblical story, one recalls, it was under Joshua’s leadership that the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. He has declined the office of a mere appendage to King who ought to have receded into the background after his death. Another reason is that, since King’s death in 1968, Abernathy has not been a team player. The ostensible reason is Abernathy’s unedifying account of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s activities during his last night on earth. Ralph David Abernathy’s autobiography has been subjected to a concerted and often uncivil attack by the civil-rights establishment, led by Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP.
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