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Interview with David M. Katzman

1. How did Abernathys background affect his accomplishments?
Katzman: Abernathys background had a profound influence on his role as a race leader, a civil
rights leader, and in the courage he displayed in confronting Southern segregation and
unconstitutional oppression. Growing up in the South and experiencing unconstitutional
second-class citizenship, he understood how segregation and Jim Crow oppressed Black people.
His father was the son of a slave, and the he grew up poor, which led him to better appreciate
the economic oppression that was inherent in the segregated South. That he made it to college
and his experience in the army both shaped his sense that things could be different. As a
minister, he entered what was historically the single most important black leadership
institution. Not only were ministers leaders, but the Black church was the single most important
Black institution beyond the control and power of Whites. Though his calling was a spiritual
one, he understood that role as a communal and civil one as well. Thus in helping to build and
guide a mass movement of protest, he was closer in experience and background to the mass of
southern Blacks than King was. He also more strongly stressed economic opportunities and
gains than did King, especially among poorer Black people. All of this led him to be more
involved in the day to day aspects of the movement rather than its lofty rhetoric. That rhetoric
was important and inspired the participants in the movement, but the day to day. People to
people concerns was just as essential.
2. What role did Ralph Abernathy play in the Civil Rights Movement? And how was he an
inspiration?
Katzman: His role was more as a practical, down-to-earth leader, and as a movement organizer.
The success of the movement depended upon its ability to draw in community leaderslocal
ministersas well as young people, and to have an organization in which they could participate
and combine their voices as well as commit their bodies. Abernathy was critical in providing
roles for the growing number of supporter attracted by the rhetoric and visions of Martin
Luther King, Jr. That role inspired many young people to participate (and form their own
organizations); but without those skills of Abernathy the movement would have withered like
many other protest by Black people before. In other words, he helped the movement bridge
from isolated protests to a social movement.
3. Why was it important that Abernathy was a minister?
Katzman: Nearly all Black leaders at the time came from the ministry. As ministers they were
leaders in the single most important Black-controlled institution. Churches were the one
sanctuary Blacks could criticize Whites and Southern segregation beyond White control. Church
halls were the most important Black communal space. At the same time it is important not to

see ministers and churches only as secular institutions. If that were so, the movement would
never have achieved the success it did. Black culture rested heavily on spirituality and religion;
it gave meaning to their lives when secular life was hard and cruel as slaves and as second-class
citizens. And it gave inspiration for people to turn out day after day, placing at risk so much of
their ordinary lives. And as King articulated in his stirring rhetoric and as Abernathy did daily in
the culture of Black religion and the Bible, he spoke a language that Blacks shared. The first
book in any Black Southern home was the Bible, and the race leader they rubbed shoulders
with were ministers like Abernathy. But he added protest against second class citizenship and
economic oppression to his ministerial rhetoric and religiosity.
4. What was his role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
Katzman: I am not an expert on the boycott, but he played a role in encouraging the public role
that King took, in recruiting and organizing other ministers into an effective organization. He
spoke a language both as a leader and as one whose experiences were rooted in the Black rural
masses, many now living in the cities of the South. He was a risk taker in the best sense of that
term; though nonviolent, he was not afraid to go to jail, to peacefully stand up as a Black man,
and to face white hostility. Again, that was the kind of day to day courage that served to inspire
and draw in many ordinary Black people ion Montgomery.
5. What do historians/scholars think were his greatest achievements?
Katzman: His role in organizing and leading the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thus
giving SCLC roots in Southern Black communities. There was Black resistance to the
movementafter all local Blacks and leaders had to live in their communities long after a
publicized King-led local community protest had moved on to another town. Who could assure
the safety of local Black ministers and protesters when reporters and national TV moved on to
another community? To that extent Abernathy was closer to understanding the plight of
ordinary Black people, especially in his economic concerns, than was King. These concerns
helped King move the movement towards economic equality as well as civil rights, and
Abernathy stress this as an agenda, as in the Poor Peoples Campaign, after Kings assassination.
As I discussed above, Abernathy was more rooted in ordinary Southern Black life, and was thus
effective in helping to build a social movement.
6. Why is Ralph Abernathy considered a great leader?
Katzman: Because of his role in the Civil Rights Movement. Sustained, broad, successful nonviolent social movements are rare in history; the U.S. Civil Rights Movement achieved incredible
successes. Without Abernathy, and his practical, day to day role as a movement leader, the
movement would not have achieved as much as it did.

7. What relationship did he have with Martin Luther King Jr.?

Katzman: They were close. In many ways from different worlds, they met as young ministers in
Montgomery and shaped a partnership and friendship during the Montgomery bus boycott.
Kings pacifism influenced Abernathy, and Abernathy, I believe, provided King with an
experiential bridge to the culture of the Black masses in the South. Together they shaped the
Civil Rights Movement.
8. Would the Civil Rights Movement have been possible without Ralph Abernathy? Why or why
not?
Katzman: I dont think so. I know of hundreds of protest that never led to a movement. While
the time was ripethe erosion of Jim Crow in the North, the experience of Black soldiers in
World War II, more sympathetic national leaders like Eleanor Roosevelt, or the leaders at the
1948 Democratic convention like Minneapolis mayor Hubert Humphrey, which led many
Southern Democrats to walk out of the convention, the Truman administration integration of
the army, and then the Brown decision, those factors did not create a social movement. The
combination of Kings rhetoric and ability to attract TV attention (the movement was the first
social movement televised) combined with Abernathys roots in the Black masses and his
leadership and organizational skills, built a successful social movement. Many Black ministers
were skeptical of the King-led protests and young Black students looked for more sustained
direct action than Kings tactics encouraged; it was Abernathy who found ways for them to
participate as movement members or allies. That helped turn protest into a social movement.
9. What lasting impact did his work have on American society?
Katzman: President Obama would not have been the first Black (or mixed race) president; it
might have taken another century. While many aspects of American life remain unequal,
especially in income and wealth, great strides have been made. The racial gap has narrowed,
and it led to a reexamination of American life that made other movements possible, especially
in revolutions in gender and sexuality. Equality has not been achieved, but the U.S. is a more
open society than ever.
10. How did you contribute to the Civil Rights Movement?
Katzman: I was raised in a race conscious world; my family had been in the music business, and
my parents and an aunt worked with and had close Black friends. I first encountered Jim Crow
in 1951 when my family took a winter break holiday in Washington, D.C. We stayed in a
downtown hotel, and my parents thought they could invite Black friends to have breakfast and
dinner at the hotel so the children could meet their friends. It was not possible; Blacks could
enter only as service workers. My parents would go at night to socialize with Black fiends in

private homes or at Black restaurants. We lived in Queens in a mostly white, Jewish

neighborhood; my parents sent my brother and me to a YMCA camp rather than a Jewish one
(as our friends attended) because the Y camp was 1/3 Black, including many of the counselors. I
also had some friends whose parents had been communists in the 1930s, and I attended
hootenannies (folk concerts) and rallies that involved civil rights songs and protest. (I used to
joke that I thought everyone had a mimeograph machine in their basement.) Thus starting in
the middle 1950s, when I was in high school and college, I participated in civil rights protests
(my high school had an NAACP club). Some local issues then were Woolworths stores hiring
Black workers or the integration of government construction projects in which hirings were
often controlled by white-only unions. I was arrested at one demonstration, though let go at
the police station. Support of the civil rights movement was an important activity at my college,
which supported Black education in a Virginia County which had closed its public schools rather
than integrate. (Andy Goodman was a classmate at Queens College.) In the 1960s as a graduate
student I was involved in civil rights actions, sit-ins and protests. I was often a public speaker at
protests and rallies. All of this led me to specialize in Black history and culture, and I contributed
to the movement by my research. I helped shift scholarship from focusing on Black people as an
object to making them a subject; to move beyond seeing Black people as victims and passive to
exploring their role as actors and in shaping their own lives and culture. My first book, based on
my dissertation, was Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century. It was an
attempt to understand Black life as Blacks experienced it. I later wrote and published Seven
Days A Week, a book about domestic servants, which was motivated by exploring about the
single most important Black womens occupation.