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 Beach and exploring big cities like Beijing and Shanghai.
As our conversation began to wrap up, Nelson suggested that I stay the night at his house. I declined, but I was moved by this striking example of Alabama’s world-renowned Southern hospitality.
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In 1946, Nelson’s older brother, Spurgeon Malden, moved to Montgomery from his home in Pensacola, Florida. Two years later, in 1948, his other brother, Stephen Malden, moved to Montgomery and became a barber at College Hill after finishing high school in Pensacola. So the pattern was well established by 1952, when Nelson completed high school in Pensacola and he, too, moved to Montgomery. He enrolled in Alabama State College and likewise became a barber at College Hill, where his two brothers had already established a good relationship with the owner.
At that time, the College Hill Barbershop, located at the corner of Jackson and Hutchinson Streets in Montgomery’s Centennial Hill neighborhood, was the busiest black barbershop in the entire city of Montgomery. It was located about a block from Alabama State College and because of its proximity to the college campus, the barbershop was an assembly line of sorts for cutting the hair of black students, where a haircut normally cost them about $1.75. Most of Nelson’s clients were students, but he also cut the hair of many professors, who were among the African American elite in Montgomery at the time. Even the president of Alabama State College was a regular customer of College Hill, and so were most of the black doctors in Montgomery. Isaac Hathaway, one of the men commissioned by the United States Mint to create the first Booker T. Washington silver dollar, visited frequently, and Nelson had five or six clients who had PhDs, and others who were in the finance industry. Another regular client of Nelson’s was Vernon John, who was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church before Reverend King arrived. According to Nelson, Vernon John was the first black minister in the United States to have a sermon published in a national publication.
Since the barbershop’s clientele included some of Montgomery’s black social and political influencers, Nelson was just nineteen years old when he was first able to spend a great deal of time with some of the most important local