“Hear Me Tonight”: Ralph Abernathy and the Sermonic Pedagogy of the Birmingham Mass Meeting

Abstract

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”

Notes

¹I am indebted to RR reviewers Keith Miller and Shirley Wilson Logan for their rich and insightful feedback. I also want to acknowledge Keith Gilyard, Ian Marshall, and Heather Thomson-Bunn for commenting on earlier drafts of this project.

²Vorris Nunley adapts the Aristotelian rhetorical term phronimos to apply to African-Americans who dispense wisdom, knowledge, rhetoric, and logic generated by and sensitive to the existential, aesthetic, and political needs of other blacks. Most typically, this practical wisdom circulates in nontraditional educational venues such as beauty shops, barbershops, and sometimes churches, mosques, or legion halls.

³Among the book-length treatments of King's rhetoric, Richard Lischer's The Preacher King, Jonathan Rieder's The Word of the Lord is Upon Me, and Gary Selby's Martin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom afford passing references to Abernathy's mass-meeting speeches but little analysis. Gary Selby's “Scoffing at the Enemy” offers one of the few article-length analyses of Abernathy's rhetoric but does not focus on Birmingham.

⁴According to a Birmingham Police Department Inter-Office Communication, dated May 7, 1963, seven men spoke during the May 3 mass meeting at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church: Edward Gardner, Abraham Woods, Andrew Young, James Bevel, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and A. D. King. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, as was typically the case during these gatherings, were the featured speakers. Moreover, Abernathy would more often than not speak before King. That Abernathy follows King on one of the more critical days of the civil rights movement seems to illustrate both King's regard for his colleague and Abernathy's oratorical abilities. See the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute for an audio recording of King's and Abernathy's respective speeches. I obtained the police reports from the Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts.

⁵Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, a long-time activist, protested against police brutality in Birmingham and recorded several of the mass meetings in 1963. During an interview I conducted in 2005, he noted regarding the May 3rd rally that “when King spoke all the media was there with their lights on. When Ralph got up to speak everything shut off.”