Born in Linden, Alabama, in 1926, Ralph Abernathy became an ordained Baptist minister in 1948, received a B.S. in mathematics from Alabama State College in 1950 and an M.A. in sociology from Atlanta University in 1951, and became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In Montgomery, Abernathy, together with E. D. Nixon, Jo Ann Robinson, and Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) in 1955 to organize a Bus Boycott after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. The MIA successfully organized the Montgomery bus boycott, filing a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction against Montgomery's segregated seating practices. The Supreme Court upheld this injunction in 1956.

The success of the bus boycott and of the MIA as a community-based organization signaled the beginning of a sustained effort to attack segregation through nonviolent protest. In 1957, civil rights organizers such as Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, together with ministers such as Abernathy, King, Joseph Lowery, and Fred Shuttlesworth, formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as an umbrella organization of southern black churches that helped coordinate the nonviolent direct action as a political strategy to end segregation. King was president of the SCLC, Abernathy served as the "bagman," and activists such as Ella Baker did much of the behind-the-scenes organizing. With the SCLC, Abernathy assisted in organizing economic boycotts of merchants, sit-ins, and marches to win civil and voting rights.

In 1961, Abernathy became pastor of the West Hunter Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Abernathy was one of King's closest associates and felt overshadowed by King's reputation. Upon King's assassination in 1968, Abernathy became president of the SCLC and went on to lead a march in April in support of the black striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, the city in which King was assassinated. In May 1968, Abernathy led the Poor People's Campaign march and encampment in Washington, D.C., an event the SCLC had planned prior to King's death, in an effort to bring together a multiracial protest movement to draw attention to issues of ongoing poverty that President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs had not addressed. . .