In 1966, Nelson Malden ran for public office in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the first African American to do so. Campaigning for him was his friend Martin Luther King Jr., who had organized protests and had written the speeches that would help criminalize racial segregation and discrimination from his seat in the Malden Brothers Barbershop. In The Colored Waiting Room, modern-day activist Kevin Shird heads from his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland to Montgomery to meet eighty-four-year-old Nelson