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 community, which kept its members motivated and engaged. Times were hard, but many of them felt they could turn the corner on civil rights issues. Despite the violence, they were hopeful.
“Were you ever concerned about the safety of your family there in Montgomery?” I asked Nelson.
“Every day.”
He continued by explaining that he was often concerned about his own safety and the safety of his family and friends, but it was also a way of life. There was a lot of racial tension all over the South at the time, and blacks were often targets of violence. The Ku Klux Klan, white segregationists, and other hate groups were frequent terrorizers. Some of the violence was random, but much of it was organized. Cross burnings and bombings throughout the South were common. Moreover, Nelson said they happened more often than people realize, because they weren’t always reported in the news or to law enforcement, and that blacks in Montgomery often became aware of incidents of violence because the information was received through a network of black churches throughout the South.
Those type of things happened all the time. This was terrorism before the mainstream media began using the word “terrorism,” and it was always directed at black people. We were the victims of their ire against desegregating the South.
1 Del Quentin Wilber, “Aspiring Agents Learn from Mistakes of FBI ‘Shameful’ Investigation of Martin Luther King Jr.,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2016.
2 Clayborne Carson, Editor, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Warner Books, 2001), 80.
3: America Lynched
Nelson’s recollection of lynchings and violence against African Americans during the days of Jim Crow is still vivid in his mind. “You could know a person one day and then the next, they were gone. Later, you would hear that they were beaten up, kidnapped, or even killed by the Klan,” Nelson said. When Nelson was a young man, racially motivated assaults and killings of black people were a way of life that all African Americans were keenly aware of.
The first encounter Nelson remembers having with racist Jim Crow policies was in Pensacola, Florida, in the Crescent Department Store when he was a young child. Inside the department store were designated public water fountains, one that was labeled “Whites Only” and another that was labeled “Colored Only.” Nelson said that he couldn’t read well when he was a little boy, and so he ran over to the water fountain that was designated for whites only to get some water, because he was thirsty. His mother ran up behind him, slapped him hard, and yelled, “Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me?”
Nelson didn’t understand why his mother was so infuriated with him. He said, “She was so angry she was turning blue in the face.” As he got older and began to understand the world he was living in, Nelson saw that his mother was trying to keep him out of danger. In those years, something as innocent as that could have gotten a person of color killed in the Deep South.
Not infrequently, black people in the South were killed for the most irrational reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all. Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago who traveled south to visit relatives. On August 28, 1955, he was kidnapped and murdered in Money, Mississippi. The story behind the lynching of Emmett Till is still one of the most recognized and talked about in American history. It was a grotesque crime, and the level of brutality inflicted upon the young teenager helped galvanize the civil rights movement, which was just beginning to gather steam.
“I first learned about Emmett Till when I was in the barbershop one day and one of my customers was talking about the incident. He said that a little boy had been lynched down in Mississippi. A short time later, black and white people all over the country were in an uproar about what happened,”