Successor Will Keep To Aims

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31649, 8 April 1968, Page 13

Successor Will Keep To Aims

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

ATLANTA (Georgia), April 6.

The man who rushed forward and wrapped a towel round his leader’s wounded head, and stayed with him until his death, now finds himself the successor to Dr Martin Luther King.

He is Dr Ralph Abernathy, aged 41, who served with the assassinated Negro civil rights leader from the beginning. Dr Abernathy told a stunned Negro crowd after Dr King’s death: “'".e gave his life for the cause of civil rights and non-violence. We will not lose sight of his aims.”

Together, Dr King and Dr Abernathy founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1955, and now Dr Abernathy follows Dr King as its president Dr Abernathy takes over where Dr King left off. He plans to lead the scheduled march in Memphis on Monday in support of the Negro garbage workers there. This was the dispute that had brought Dr King to the Tennessee city last week.

Dr Abernathy also plans to take Dr King’s place at the head of the “poor people’s” march on Washington later this month.

The friendship between the two men began in the early 1950 s in Montgomery, Alabama, where they were both pastors. Together they successfully led the 381-day boycott campaign to desegregate the city’s buses. Soon after the boycott; the S.C.L.C. was -founded, then they moved to Atlanta—Dr King’s home town—where the organisation has been based ever since.