It’s widely understood that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. evolved significantly on the issue of reparations during his short lifetime. Toward the start of his career, he was a moralist in his thinking, rather than the radical economic thinker he later became. In 2018, I befriended Dr. King’s former barber, Nelson Malden, now in his late 80s, and wrote a book with him titled “The Colored Waiting Room” about Nelson’s life and the American civil rights movement.
