Boston city officials recently joined the nonprofit group King Boston to break ground on a new memorial dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.
On April 27th, on the day that would’ve been Coretta Scott King’s 95th birthday, Gov. Charlie Baker, Boston City Mayor Michelle Wu and Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins joined in on King Boston’s celebration of the start of the memorial’s construction.
Using golden shovels with the nonprofit’s name and logo on them, the officials ceremoniously dug into the ground of the Boston Common where the memorial, known officially as “the Embrace,” will be built on.
“All of us want to leave a little footprint in the sands of time. We’ve done that here today,” said the executive director of King Boston, former state Rep. Marie St. Fleur, at the event. “This is a relay race about who we want to be in this country and in this city. It’s up to us. It’s not just words. It’s action.”
“I thank you for allowing us to plant this footprint here in the middle of the oldest public park in America because someday I’m going to walk with my grandchild right here in this park and I’m going to say this happened here,” she added.
“The Embrace” honors the love between Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King in the city they fell in love in when he was a Theology graduate student at Boston University and she was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Modeled after the embrace between the couple when Dr.King found out he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the 20-foot sculpture will permanently immortalize the Kings’ time in Boston. It will also serve as a place where people can discuss, reflect and learn about the couple’s beliefs and goals during the Civil Rights Movement.
Plans to create a memorial for the Kings first began in 2017 when entrepreneur Paul English and his co-chair, Rev. Liz Walker of the Roxbury Presbyterian Church, decided to commit to the cause.
Motivated by the fact that, while Dr. King had a memorial, there was no memorial for the couple, they created an Art Committee featuring educators, artists and curators with backgrounds in the Black art tradition. With help from the Art Committee, they chose the five best designs of the 126 designs that were submitted by teams from all over the world and opened it up to the public to decide the top three for King Boston and the City of Boston to choose from.
On March 4, 2019, the Art Committee announced that “The Embrace” by Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group will be developed as the memorial.
Once it’ll be completed in October, “the Embrace” will be one of the largest memorials dedicated to racial equity in the U.S., according to King Boston.
“These are troubled times, but this day gives us great hope that we will learn from and ‘embrace’ the lessons from our past and then act on them,” said Rev. Liz Walker. “And so I say to those of us who are privileged to stand on this hallowed ground today, ‘Because you are here, you have a great responsibility to do more for freedom, justice and love.’”
