the cool shade of a tall tree. Nelson was wearing tan slacks, a white short-sleeved button-up shirt, and a vintage hat to shield his head from the powerful Alabama sun.
Just like the first time I saw him, he reminded me of my grandfather Gradie Shird, who died when I was a young teenager. My grandfather raised twelve kids with my grandmother, so although it didn’t happen often, he had a lot of experience knocking young people upside the head and putting them in their places when necessary. He was a man’s man and had the knuckles to back it up.
Nelson was similarly mild-mannered, with a calm and relaxed demeanor, but he was nobody’s pushover. His mind was sharp, and he was articulate. I could see that he had taken care of himself over the years, and he said his health was excellent. He was easygoing and had a lot of style and class.
I was elated to see Nelson, but I was curious as to why we were meeting in an empty lot. This was my first time seeing him in person since we first met in Baltimore, months earlier.
“Hi there,” he said. “Is this your first time in Alabama?”
“Yes, it sure is.”
“Okay! In that case, we need to make sure that you get the chance to taste some good Alabama food while you’re here. We have to get you a big old plate of fried catfish, or shrimp and grits.”
One way to have a memorable time when traveling is to embrace the cuisine of your host city. The food is one of the things you’ll never forget about any place you visit. My mouth began to water at his suggestion, but then, just as quickly, our conversation shifted to the real reason I was here: to hear Nelson reflect on the many years of black triumph in the South, as well as those years of trepidation. As Nelson and I began talking, he spoke about the period that he referred to as the “old days.” It was a time when blacks in America had to fight for the right to be treated as equal citizens, a time when it was all too easy for blacks to be pushed aside by barriers that were both social and legal—and a time when anger at this injustice, in a supposedly free country, was reaching a boiling point. It was clear to me that the civil rights era was still fresh in Nelson’s mind, the source of memories, both good and bad, that he will never forget.
As Nelson and I stood there on Jackson Street, he began to explain to me why he had wanted to meet there, which still wasn’t clear to me. He told me that we were in Montgomery’s Centennial Hill neighborhood, a once segregated section of the city, which in the middle of the twentieth century was both the capital of Alabama and the epicenter of the American civil rights movement. The area was rich with history, and not only for the successes achieved here in the struggle for black freedom.
In the 1950s, Jackson Street was where black people in the South wanted to be—like Madison Avenue in New York, but much more intimate. For Nelson, it was where he had a front row seat to the American civil rights movement as it unfolded in real time. Many activists and leaders in the civil rights movement emerged from somewhere within a ten-block radius around Jackson Street. In 1954, King lived with his beautiful wife, Coretta Scott King, at 309 S. Jackson Street. With Reverend King residing one block away, there was a lot of activity in this neighborhood.
At the top of Jackson Street was the campus of Alabama State College, now Alabama State University. Alabama State was like an incubator for young black activists, encouraging them to become part of something bigger than themselves. Many students who attended the college were involved in the demonstrations and civil disobedience actions that took place in Montgomery and elsewhere across Alabama and the nation. They protested in the Montgomery streets, and they took trains and buses to other cities to march in their streets. They had no idea at the time how significant their impact would be, but they ultimately became just as important to the movement as the leaders that we know today.
Before I met Nelson, the Deep South was a place that I never had much interest in visiting. Now, standing there on a clear, hot day in the thick humidity of the summer, I couldn’t believe I’d never been there before. It had a rich history, a legacy etched in the pavement. In Nelson’s own words: “We were young, we were brave, and we were crazy sometimes, because we often put ourselves in harm’s way. But many positive outcomes were achieved during a time when all we wanted to do was to make a difference and all we wanted in return was equal rights.”
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Nelson was born on November 8, 1933 in Monroeville, Alabama—also the birthplace, seven years earlier, of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird—and grew up in Pensacola, Florida. His father, born in 1896, and his mother, born in 1900, met in Monroeville in the early 1900s. His paternal grandfather was a slave until the Emancipation Proclamation, declared by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. One of his maternal great-grandfathers was a white man.
The man who owned Nelson’s paternal grandfather was a prominent and wealthy builder who arrived in Monroeville in the mid-1800s to construct homes and other buildings. As a child, Nelson often wondered why his grandfather’s house was so well-built compared to other homes in the community. Later, he discovered that his grandfather had learned how to build homes from the white man who’d once owned him.
The white great-grandfather had a wife and children, but also two other families living in Monroeville with children he conceived and supported.
Let me explain: My mother’s grandfather was a white man who was married to a white woman, but he also had ten children with an African American woman and ten children with a Native American woman. The kids were all mixed race or mulatto, whatever word you want to use to describe them. Follow me? So, my mother’s father was half white and half black. His wife, my grandmother—my mother’s mother—was a pureblooded Indian from Monroeville.
My mother was mixed race and incredibly beautiful. Her complexion was very light, and her hair was long and black. I was very close with her. I was the youngest of seven boys, and she gave me the impression that I was the pretty boy in the family; she kept me dressed up all the time. But my father was a disciplinarian, and he wouldn’t let her love for her children interfere with his discipline.
Nelson’s father was a World War I veteran and had learned the importance of strong discipline while in the military. As a result, all his children managed to avoid the pitfalls of drugs and jail. Growing up in the segregated South, his father had had very few opportunities, and so he understood the importance of education; he wanted his sons to have a bright future with financial security. Starting when Nelson was old enough to go to school, when the family was in Pensacola, Nelson’s father had enrolled him in a private school with a tuition of fifty cents a day.
Nelson was diligent in pursuing education from there forward. After moving to Montgomery from Florida in 1952, he enrolled in Alabama State College, founded in 1867 by a group of freed slaves. The college was just a short walk from the College Hill Barbershop, where he worked with his brothers. Nelson would take a leave of absence midway through college to serve in the military, like his father before him, spending sixteen months in the United States Navy before receiving an honorable discharge. He then returned to Montgomery to continue working with his brothers and complete his education. When Nelson received his bachelor’s degree in political science, his father’s dream of having an educated youngest son was fulfilled.
Nelson met his loving wife Willodean, “Dee,” as she prefers to be called, in 1959, when she came in to the barbershop to get her hair cut. Four months later, on Valentine’s Day, 1960, they married. Dee was also well educated, a graduate of Alabama State College with a degree in elementary education. She worked as a teacher at an elementary school in Montgomery.
Nelson and Dee never had children. Throughout the fifty-eight years they’ve been together, it has been just the two of them, and they’ve stayed madly in love. They’ve vacationed around the world, sunbathing in places like Aruba, Bermuda, and Miami
