It is not hard to miss the old West Hunter Street Baptist Church.
Vacant and crumbling since the early 1970s, the old stone church — just blocks from a new football stadium that is rising in downtown Atlanta — is a shell of its former self.
The stained glass in the front rose window, which helped define the church’s look, is all but gone. The bright red door that once greeted parishioners is faded. Collapsed ceilings and peeled paint lie behind boarded up windows.
It’s hard to imagine that 54 years ago, on Feb. 11 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered to the West Hunter congregation one of his most meaningful sermons, “A Knock at Midnight,” to welcome a man to town who he called his best friend — and the church’s new pastor — Ralph David Abernathy.
“God has blessed West Hunter. He has given to you a man who’s had a peculiar awareness of the need for the bread of social justice,” King preached. “He’s given to you a man who has a peculiar awareness the problems that individuals face in life.”
Close to Abernathy’s and King’s homes, the church was an easy meeting place that also served as headquarters for several organizations and civil rights leaders and as a training facility for nonviolence.
“West Hunter was the spiritual workplace of the movement,” said Abernathy’s son, Ralph David Abernathy III. “A lot of important events that can’t be ignored or forgotten took place there.”
Abernathy III, who is fighting his own dark battles, has been trying to make sure that history and his father are not forgotten.
In January, those efforts got a boost when the National Park Service announced official plans to begin exploring the possibility of making the old West Hunter Street Baptist Church a National Historic Site.
If selected, the church could become part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site. It would be only the fourth National Park Site in metro Atlanta – following the MLK site, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park and the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.
It now has to pass a lengthy screening by the U.S. Department of the Interior, which could take up to three years before a single piece of stained glass is repaired.
Honoring a father and leader
The story goes that the stones used to build West Hunter were laid by former slaves. In 1962, fresh off of their victories in the South, King convinced Abernathy — who was with him during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts — to leave Alabama and take over the church.
Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was the co-pastor, reigned as the leading Atlanta church during the civil rights movement. But West Hunter served an important role as well.
“I still remember the red doors and the bright red carpet,” said Abernathy’s youngest, Kwame Abernathy. “It was so packed on Sundays. It was the hottest ticket in Atlanta at the time.”
So hot that by 1972, the church had outgrown its membership and relocated to another location, on Gordon Street (now Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard), while retaining the name.
Another church briefly moved into the old space, but the building has basically been vacant since then.
Abernathy III, a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives, has been trying for at least two decades to get something done with West Hunter to honor his father. He purchased the building about 15 years ago in an attempt to build a museum in it.
“I walked out of Busy Bee Café, one day and looked over at the church,” said Abernathy III, 56. “God gave me the vision to get that church in honor of my father and my father’s legacy.”
But recently, the matter has taken a greater urgency. Five years ago, Abernathy III was quietly diagnosed with colon cancer, which has since spread to his liver. Late last year, he was hospitalized for weeks with complications and when he finally returned home, the once stout politician-turned-preacher weighed 120 pounds.
"I knew then that I couldn't hide it any longer. That was right around the time Jimmy Carter announced he had cancer, so that gave me encouragement," he said.
He now says restoring the church and his father’s image is the “beginning of my life’s work.”
While it is still too early to determine how much it would cost to refurbish the church, Abernathy III is trying to raise $3.5 million to build a “freedom plaza” outside of it.
The plaza would include a 25-foot bronze monument dedicated to his parents, Ralph and Juanita Abernathy, Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and John Lewis; and a wall featuring the names of all “freedom fighters” and Southern Christian Leadership Conference staff.
Abernathy III hopes to break ground this year.
“I do believe that something needs to happen over there and this needs to be the first significant monument,” said landscape architect Jay Scott, who is designing the plaza. “We hope that the attention this will garner will spur other development over there, which is terribly needed.”
A complicated legacy
Ralph David Abernathy’s legacy has faded since his death in 1990.
In the critically-acclaimed movie "Selma," his family maintains that the Abernathy character was "grossly mischaracterized," as someone uneducated and more interested in eating than freedom. The movie also never touched on the partnership King and Abernathy shared.
"Every time Martin Luther King gave a speech, Ralph David Abernathy gave one. Every time Martin Luther King went to jail, Ralph David Abernathy was with him," Abernathy III said. "They have taken the work of two men and gave all the credit to Martin. My father and family never opposed it, but it wasn't right."
But for some, “Selma,” was just a culmination of 25 years of backlash against Abernathy for his 1989 autobiography “And the Walls Came Tumbling Down.”
In the book, Abernathy wrote that on the night before King was assassinated in Memphis, he spent the night with two women and fought with a third in his hotel room.
Abernathy was roundly condemned by his civil rights colleagues. The Rev. Otis Moss Jr. called it a “second assassination” of King. John Lewis said it violated a “shared trust.”
Hosea Williams called Abernathy “the Judas of the movement,” and later said he was “the loneliest man in the world.”
Abernathy died at the age of 64, only months after the book came out.
Abernathy III rejects the notion that his father’s autobiography contributed to his downfall and suggests it had more to do with jealously from “people who wanted to be in Ralph’s spot.”
“Nobody can define my father’s contributions based on two pages in a 600 page book. That would be ludicrous,” Abernathy III said. “This is an opportunity to tell the truth and put my father in his rightful place in history. It is important that two black men can come together with no jealously and envy and changed the course of history.”
On April 3, 1968, the night before he died and the night that Abernathy writes about in his book, King took to the pulpit of Mason Temple in Memphis to address a mass rally in the midst of a violent storm.
Like always, Abernathy was at his side.
“As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about,” King said. “It’s always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you, and Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.”
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