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 out of the taxi, I looked to my left and saw my eighty-four-year-old friend standing there under 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