Thomas Gerstle Abernethy (May 16, 1903 – June 11, 1998) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Mississippi for 15 terms from 1943 to 1973.

Abernethy was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto[3] that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.

[9] He is also notable for having made the first public citation of the anti-semitic hoax A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century, on June 7, 1957, during a debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1957, when he read a quotation from it into the congressional record and claimed it as proof that the Civil rights movement was a foreign communist plot.

This useless, unnecessary and inexcusable attack took the lives of 34 American boys, wounded 175 others, and left many others in a state of horrified shock, to say nothing of what it did to a flag-flying vessel of the U.S. Navy.

And who has spoken out in their behalf from this land since some of their number were so suddenly shot down and others so severely wounded on the Liberty ship?