TUSKEGEE, Ala. — With a bit of giddiness in his voice, Nick Mosby can still recall the day he first laid eyes on the woman who he says was destined to become his bride.
It was a chance encounter in the student union building at Tuskegee University.
“She was a beautiful young woman,” Nick Mosby says about the first-year political science student from Boston named Marilyn Jones. “I really didn’t know that she was interested in me until a mutual friend pointed her out. One day, we were in the cafeteria and I just started staring at her from across the room for about 10 minutes.”
Later, the two ran into each other again. This time, it was at a late-night party. They exchanged phone numbers and “started talking every day,” he says about their courtship. “And we haven’t stopped talking since.”
Thirteen years after they graduated from Tuskegee, the Mosbys have been catapulted into the national spotlight by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man who died of spinal cord injuries in April while in the custody of Baltimore police officers.
Last month, Marilyn Mosby, 35, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, filed criminal charges against the six police officers. Her husband Nick Mosby, 36, who has been a member of the Baltimore City Council since 2011, has been a calming presence in the city, calling for better relations between police and the community in the wake of Gray’s death, which sparked massive protests — including some that turned violent — across Baltimore.
In an interview with Diverse, the Mosbys credit their time at Tuskegee University — the rural Black college founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington — with helping them to hone and cultivate their leadership skills to handle the Baltimore crisis.
