Imagine Montgomery, Alabama at the height of the civil rights movement – a place where one man’s barbershop became a gathering place for Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fellow leaders to actively discuss change and how they would organize to make their voices heard. In honor of the 50thanniversary of the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., author Kevin Shird and eighty-four year old, Nelson Malden, will discuss The American Civil Rights Movement, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Turning Dialogue and Intention into Action. Anthony McCarthy, Executive Director, Baltimore NAACP, will moderate a panel of Baltimore leaders, including:

• Diane Bell McKoy, President and CEO, Associated Black Charities
• Joe Jones, Founder and CEO, Center for Urban Families
• Brad Shapiro, Principal, Jabber Five Real Estate Group

Nelson Malden’s barbershop was where the civil rights movements’ courageous leaders, including his friend Martin Luther King Jr., gathered to organize protests and boycotts and to write the speeches that would help criminalize racial segregation and discrimination. In The Colored Waiting Room: Empowering the Original and the New Civil Rights Movements, activist Kevin Shird heads from his hometown of Baltimore, MD to Montgomery to meet eighty-four-year-old Nelson Malden and contextualize the significance of recent racially motivated events, and the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Ferguson, Baltimore, and around the country. The result is a groundbreaking understanding of today’s burgeoning second-wave civil rights movement and the urgent actions necessary for racial equality and change. Here, Shird raises the profound question of whether blacks are still in a colored waiting room, biding their time and waiting for racial equality to be the norm.