to Atlanta, and on King’s frequent trips back to Montgomery after the move, he would visit Nelson in the barbershop, get his usual haircut, and catch up on everything under the sun.
Nelson describes King as a family man with a good heart and one of the smartest men he ever met. The public was familiar with King’s serious side, but Nelson was privileged to see his relaxed personality and good sense of humor, which he would use to joke around with people he knew well. “He could be sarcastic sometimes, but in a funny kind of way.”
Nelson was also friendly with King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, although she never came to the barbershop. He describes her as an elegant and classy woman, a kind and humble person, and also a proud wife who was the backbone and matriarch of the family. Nelson says that Mrs. King spent a considerable amount of time nurturing the King children. He remembers that he often saw their oldest daughter and son at church services, and that they would come into the barbershop with their father periodically.
Martin and Coretta Scott were married on June 18, 1953, in Marion, Alabama, at the home of Coretta’s parents. One year later, in 1954, they moved to Montgomery, and Reverend King became the pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist. He was only twenty-five years old at the time. Years later, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would be renamed Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church. Today, it is a National Historic Landmark. The church still conducts services in the location where King preached some of his most riveting sermons.
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Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was beloved by people across America who were unwavering supporters of his method of protest through civil disobedience. They agreed with that practice, and they also agreed that policy changes in favor of civil rights for African Americans were desperately needed. But King also had many detractors and enemies, people who wanted to end his efforts to transform the racial landscape of America. Many people even wanted to see him dead.
It’s common knowledge today that the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked to undermine King and used prohibited means to do so, ranging from illegal wiretapping and unauthorized surveillance to concentrated character assassination. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stated in a November 18, 1964 news conference that King was, “the most notorious liar in the country.” King’s home, offices, and hotel rooms were frequently wiretapped, and he was constantly harassed by Hoover’s agents and threatened in ways that if used today would probably send a law enforcement official to federal prison. The FBI even sent King a letter that recommended he commit suicide.
In a declassified internal Justice Department memo dated October 7, 1963 and sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover wrote:
In view of the possible communist influence in the racial situation, it is requested that authority be granted to place a technical surveillance on King at his current address or at any future address to which he may move.1
In 2003, that memorandum was declassified by the Justice Department. Its text wasn’t totally shocking, but it was disheartening to know that the federal government had worked in such a vicious way to undermine a leader for social justice. Today, the FBI uses the encroachment on King’s civil liberties by J. Edgar Hoover as part of the bureau’s cultural sensitivity training at the academy in Virginia for its new agents. It’s a shameful reminder of a past injustice, but it’s being used today to help right a wrong and educate others.
On January 30, 1956, the will and resolve of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was tested in a way that no reasonable husband or father would ever want to be tested, when the lives of his wife and his young daughter came into the crosshairs of murderous white segregationists. The Montgomery Bus Boycott that was then underway—a period of more than a year in which many blacks in Montgomery declined to ride public transportation, following the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give her seat to a white man—was more than just a thorn in the side of city officials and the bus company. It was also a slap in the face to the white oppressors who, before that point, were comfortable with the city ordinances that segregated buses and humiliated African Americans with unreasonable policies. King had recently become the chairman and president of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association, and in that position, one of his responsibilities was to work alongside other organizations to mobilize and continue the bus boycott. On the evening of January 30, 1956, King was inside the First Baptist Church on Ripley Street, speaking at a meeting about the bus boycott, when he was told that his house had been bombed. Knowing that his wife, Coretta, and his infant daughter, Yolanda, were there, he franticly rushed home. Coretta and Yolanda were not injured, but somebody could have easily been killed. The bomb blew out the windows of the house and caused significant damage to its front porch.
Standing there in the dark of night on the badly damaged front porch of his home on Jackson Street, he tried to settle the angry mob of black people who had formed. King was quoted that night as saying, “I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop.”2
Nelson remembers that everyone was very worried for Martin and Coretta, and many people wanted to get their guns and go after the perpetrators. He says there was little doubt as to who had carried out the bombing, as a number of white people in Montgomery had been very vocal about their feelings on the bus boycott.
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Nelson remembers seeing suspicious white figures hanging around the barbershop—a particularly unusual sight in that segregated area of Montgomery—but at the time he didn’t realize that they were FBI agents. While talking with Nelson about the bureau’s harassment of the iconic civil rights leader, I could see that he still felt resentment toward them. Years after their illegal surveillance and the release of the documents confirming what was suspected by many, the mistrust that the government’s behavior created still lingers.
Nelson recalls that one day when King came into the barbershop around midday, two young white men were in a car parked across the street from the barbershop. On that occasion, they were dressed casually, and there appeared to be some type of antenna on the roof of the car. Nelson didn’t think much of it at the time because he thought they were salesmen selling insurance in the black community. Even so, he recalls that “Martin came into the shop and got a haircut, and when he left, so did the two men in the car across the street.”
About a month later, the reverend came back to the barbershop, and this time, two middle-aged white men parked right in front of it. One of the men got out and raised the hood of the car, as though they were having a mechanical problem. But once again, when King left, they immediately closed the hood of the car and drove off. Nelson and his brothers started speculating about whether they were a security detail that had been assigned to King. It wasn’t until years later, after King died, that they found out that they were FBI agents following him.
The FBI and Hoover leveled allegations against King that he was a womanizer and a communist, but these allegations never got much traction among blacks (even though they did have their intended effect on white Southerners), and Nelson found them particularly ridiculous. He knew Martin and the King family well. He had confidence in King’s good character and respected his views on the world.
“It would have taken much more for me to believe anything other than the fact that Martin was a man totally committed to the plight of black people in America,” Nelson says, going on to acknowledge that King had his flaws, but was also completely committed to his cause of advancing the state of his people, and was willing to die for that cause. “There aren’t a lot of people in the world who would give their lives to ensure that a stranger could have a better life. That’s a rare character.”
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There was a lot of tension in Montgomery in the 1960s, but there was also a deep sense of pride in the black
