I was so excited when I met an eighty-four-year-old man from Montgomery, Alabama, who knows more than most about that period in time.
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Nelson Malden is an accomplished man by any measure. He is an alumnus of Alabama State University, where he majored in political science, and a member of Montgomery’s famous Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He’s a veteran of the United States Navy, a black man who at one time took an oath to defend his country, a time when his country was not as inclined to defend his most basic liberties. He was the first black person in Montgomery to ever run for public office, and he distributed the Southern Courier newspaper, one of the few newspapers in the South to cover the African American community. He was also the barber, and close friend, of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I met Nelson in 2016, when he was in my hometown of Baltimore along with his niece and his great-niece. He was participating in an onstage discussion at the Motor House, a community performance space, about the golden years of the American civil rights movement. When Nelson was a young man, in the 1950s and 1960s, he spent many years actively participating in the nonviolent civil rights movement in Montgomery, Alabama, where he lived—a local movement that would have historic ramifications for the rest of America.
In no time at all, I realized that Nelson was exactly the type of person I needed to talk with. He had vast knowledge about and experience of a time in America that most people could only read about in books or watch in a documentary. It was there in Baltimore—during my first conversation with Nelson, backstage after the event that night—that I became eager to get to him, to hear his stories. Nelson was telling me about his life growing up in America back when racism was far more blatant than it is today, especially in the South, and particularly in Montgomery, a racist hotspot under the law of the infamous Governor George Wallace. It seemed to me that Nelson could, from his first person experience, help me understand the American civil rights movement in a three-dimensional way, a way that I’d never understood it before. And this, in turn, I thought to myself, might help me understand what led to the current form of racism that exists in America. Yet I had no idea then just how close Nelson was to the center of this history. It was one of the incredible things about him that I would discover as our friendship grew.
Nelson is optimistic that race relations in America will continue to evolve toward “the Dream” that King spoke about. Even after his friend and client was shot and killed in Memphis in 1968, Nelson never stopped believing that King’s dream would live on. He still remembers how thousands of enthusiastic people assembled in the nation’s capital for the March on Washington. He also remembers Reverend King (as he called him) receiving the Noble Peace Prize and how proud he was of his friend’s accomplishment.
Nelson spoke to me of segregation that he had personally endured. There was rampant segregation in the South, everywhere from schools to public beaches, and there was a daily fear of physical violence, even death, at the hands of white people. His eyes lit up when he spoke about such things as how incensed he was when black students in Birmingham were violently attacked during their nonviolent lunch counter sit-ins.
His expression turned somber when he recalled the footage he saw on television of men and women being savagely beaten in Selma in 1965 by Alabama State Troopers. At the time he was a young supporter of the movement, and as the brave participants in the fight for voting rights slowly began to arrive on the outskirts of Montgomery after the long march from Selma, he was there waiting with hundreds of others to greet them. Their stories of being spat on, called “nigger,” and shot at by white segregationists who were bursting with hatred are still vivid in his mind. But he also talks of looking into the eyes of the marchers that day and seeing nothing but sheer will and determination. He says that they were brave and that they were willing to die for what they believed in.
These events were some of the things that Nelson and his most famous client, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., spoke about when King was in the barber chair at the Malden Brothers Barbershop in Montgomery.
I spent nearly a year speaking regularly with Nelson Malden and visiting him often, recording everything he said on my iPhone, and then transcribing it. I was soaking up knowledge and trying to connect the dots between the civil rights movement of yesterday and the social justice movement of today. Most days I was like a fly on the wall, listening intently to the eighty-four-year-old former barber as he recounted his experiences and described his cherished friendship with an iconic civil rights leader. Some days I was smiling while listening to Nelson talk about King’s humor; other days there were tears in my eyes and I was angered by the systemic mistreatment of African Americans, then and now. As I came to understand it, the civil rights struggle of today isn’t identical to the struggle of yesterday, but it is just as significant.
Today, after all the pain and disappointments, as well as the triumphs, there’s one thing Nelson understands without question: When it comes to race, we still have a lot of work to do in this country.
1: Heading South
After I met Nelson Malden for the first time in Baltimore, we established the beginning of a friendship, and it was through that friendship that I began to learn things I had never understood before. Instantly, I became a student of history, soaking up everything I could about “the movement,” as it was often known, and about an era that was totally unfamiliar to me. This, I knew, was my chance to finally fill a void that had been lingering for most of my life. I was like an empty vessel being filled with a valuable raw commodity, a vital substance that would soon alter the way I saw the world.
Soon I was calling Nelson on the phone every week at his home in Montgomery, Alabama, hungry for knowledge. One day, he began telling me about a close friendship he’d had with an iconic leader in the movement, and I was blown away.
“Hold up. You were friends with whom?”
To my shock, it turned out that Nelson had been very good friends with none other than Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a regular at his barbershop in Montgomery through the 1950s and 1960s. King began going to the barbershop every week, right before Rosa Parks’s arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man brought the civil rights movement in Montgomery to national headlines. As Nelson described his decade-long association friendship with King, I was in near disbelief. I was on a call with someone who was not only an active member of the civil rights movement himself, but also a friend of the legendary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I listened eagerly as he told me about the time they spent together in the South during a very volatile period in this nation’s history.
One day, Nelson invited me down south to talk more in person. Of course I jumped at the opportunity and soon after, on a warm summer day in 2017, I arrived for the first time in my life in the Deep South, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, commonly known to the locals as “the Gump.” I had booked an early morning flight on Southwest Airlines leaving from the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport in Baltimore (which is named, I should point out, for the first African American justice of the US Supreme Court) for Alabama. After arriving at the Montgomery Regional Airport, I took the fifteen-minute taxi ride downtown to the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel and Spa on Tallapoosa Street.
Never having traveled before in the Deep South—a place that had been described to me as a historic (and sometimes modern) hotbed of racism—I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had been told that the Renaissance was the nicest hotel in the city and booked it because the idea of having a comfortable room to return to each night gave me comfort. As I walked into its plush lobby, the hotel seemed to live up to its reputation. I checked in at the front desk, dropped my bags off in Room 822, and ran back outside to grab another taxi. I was already running late for my scheduled meeting with Nelson.
I didn’t realize until I arrived that our meeting place was an empty lot on S. Jackson Street. When I stepped
