One step above viewing media of the events or reading about them is being able to speak with someone who actually experienced them, and having the ability to ask questions. There are people alive today who can remember and share what happened. There’s been a push to record the words of survivors of atrocities, like the Holocaust, before this generation completely passes away so that there is proof of what they endured. I believe we need the people who weathered segregation to tell their experiences too. Their words must also be recorded as proof of an atrocity. We need to understand, and remember, what they went through.
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The way I first learned about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the American civil rights movement, was very unorthodox. Today, it’s almost taboo for an African American not to know about the life and legacy of one of the most important people in our history. In fact, many of us who aren’t versed in his accomplishments have learned over the years to camouflage this deficit to avoid embarrassment. We might memorize a line or two from King’s most popular speeches, so that we are ready to recite them if pressed to do so. But when I was a kid, I wasn’t that sophisticated, and I wasn’t great at camouflaging the truth.
I was in the fifth grade, attending public school in Baltimore City, when I first began to hear about a man named Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Back then, I thought he was a famous singer. Yes, you read that right: For a few years, in grade school, I thought that the Nobel Peace Prize–winning leader of the movement for black freedom was just another man who entertained America. I know it sounds ridiculous today, but let me explain.
The reason I believed this was because the subject of King’s life and legacy was only taught to us once a year. February was Black History Month, the time when the accomplishments of legendary African American entertainers like Cab Calloway, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Nat King Cole were highlighted. Since there was no other time devoted to the subject of African American accomplishments, discussions about their lives were usually mingled together with discussions about black social and political leaders, abolitionists and revolutionaries like Harriet Tubman, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington. Once a year, during Black History Month, the biographies of these colossal figures in our history were all lumped together in one big pot like alphabet soup. A young public-school student had only twenty-eight days in the month of February to learn three hundred years of African American history.
As a result, the public schools I attended in Baltimore didn’t devote much time to teaching us about the impact King or the civil rights movement had on America. We weren’t taught the details: how King, through nonviolent protests and activism, forced the integration of lunch counters and public transportation systems in the South, and established legally mandated voting-rights equality that changed the trajectory of America. Besides Black History Month, there were no other times during the school year when King was the subject of discussion in class, so his numerous accomplishments and legacy were not crystal clear to me. At the time, his birthday had not yet been recognized as a national holiday and was not celebrated in all fifty states. Even when King’s life was the main topic in the classroom, he was never talked about with the same level of importance as other twentieth-century leaders, like President John F. Kennedy, or even international ones like Mahatma Gandhi. Although King’s impact on society was just as significant, he was not talked about in the same vein as other men who were revered for their willingness to fight for the things that are noble about our humanity.
When I was in grade school, Michael Jackson and Muhammad Ali were the two most important black men, in my mind, to ever walk the streets of America. Michael Jackson had just begun to perform his world-famous moonwalk dance while wearing that ugly white sequined glove, and Ali, my all-time favorite athlete, was still a superstar, although he was beginning to age beyond his boxing prime.
The light bulb in my young mind wasn’t turned on until middle school. That’s when I began to gradually understand that King was nobody’s singer. Nowadays, when I think back, it’s incredible to me that I lacked so much knowledge on such an important subject. Was I just another public-school student who had fallen through the cracks, or was I another victim of society’s attempt to whitewash the legacy of one of the most consequential black leaders the world has ever known?
Sometimes I wish I had been raised by parents who were Afrocentric, or maybe even Black Panther sympathizers who wore cool black leather jackets and protested systemic oppression. Maybe then there would have been all kinds of books lying around the house to enlighten me about the long history of black America. I wish that I had read books about King when I was younger, and about the early days of Malcolm X’s life, when he served time inside a Massachusetts state prison. It might have been enlightening for me to browse through the pages of books like Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, or Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I had been exposed to the literature and the history of African American heroes when I was young, my knowledge of their lives—and possibly my understanding of my own—would be much more complete today. One of the important things we get from learning history—one reason why it matters so much whose stories get told—is a sense of being able to contextualize, to see how we fit into a world that very rarely gets directly explained to us.
The stories of Harriett Tubman guiding escaped slaves through Maryland into Delaware, on their way to freedom, would have been powerful to read. Maybe I would have known more about a talented black man named Benjamin Banneker who lived in the 1700s, a clockmaker and astronomer—a rare talent for the son of a former slave, who was self-taught and had little formal education. Studying these leaders and contributors to our humanity earlier in my life and understanding their legacies could have made a big difference in how I viewed my culture and how I viewed myself. Having serious gaps in my education on black history still haunts me today, and I’m still trying to make up for that loss.
In the last few years, however, I’ve started to think that I may have been a little too hard on myself. I began to realize that I wasn’t the only one with a deficit of knowledge about the civil rights era and the accomplishments of Martin Luther King Jr., and I’m not the only person who could’ve used a few extra days of Black History Month, or who should have hung around with the smart kids who read books about the movement and were more in tune with black history. There are many of us who would have failed an African American history test when we were in school. That’s the reason 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,