This month marks sixty nine years since the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Civil Rights Icon Rosa Parks was arrested on December fifth of 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a municipal bus. The boycott started four days later. APR listeners first met Nelson Malden in 2018. He was Doctor Martin Luther King Junior’s barber. Malden recalled the first day the of the Montgomery Boycott and watching that bus from his barber shop…
“And we all ran to the window to see,” recalled Malden. “There was a black man standing on the corner across the street from the Bible shop. All the customs jumped out the chair, and all the Bible stopped clear. We went to the wonder to see what the black man gonna get on the bus and so but we could see the bus pull up. The man was still standing. We saw law the way we thought Joe Lewis had knocked that Max Schmelling.”
“Oh yeah. Well, you could tell, because the first day the boycott started, we was in the Barber shop, and one of the customers heck on the bus, and we all ran to the wonder the seed. There was a black man standing on the corner across the street from the bus shop,” said Malden.
Malden first met Dr. King shortly after the civil rights leader was first hired as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1955. Malden spoke with APR in 2018 about the day the Montgomery bus boycott started and how customers at the barber shop reacted..
“And we all ran to the window to see,” recalled Malden. “There was a black man standing on the corner across the street from the Bible shop. All the customs jumped out the chair, and all the Bible stopped clear. We went to the wonder to see what the black man gonna get on the bus and so but we could see the bus pull up. The man was still standing. We saw law the way we thought Joe Lewis had knocked that Max Schmelling.”
Alabama boxing legend Joe Lewis once knocked out German fighter Max Schmelling. To listen to APR’s story about Nelson Malden, titled “Make it like a butterfly,” click below.
