Boston played host to national media on Friday January 13th as the city unveiled “The Embrace” at the 1965 Freedom Plaza on Boston Common. This marked the start of 2023’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Day weekend. While the holiday itself is a testament to the life and works of the slain civil rights leader, “The Embrace” is something special, something distinct from the many statues to King that have surfaced in the nearly 55 years since his death. It’s a celebration of the bond King and his wife Coretta Scott shared with each other and with the city of Boston during their early years as college students in Boston. King studied at Boston University and a young Coretta Scott studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1951. Arguably, the four years spent in Boston were formative for King. He earned his Doctorate at Boston University, met his brilliant lifelong partner, and by 1955 the seeds of a civil rights revolution were planted.

The Embrace is a bronze figural abstraction based on a photo of an embrace between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The 20-foot-tall, 25-foot-wide work emphasizes collective action, women as leaders, and the forging of new bonds of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability. It’s an unprecedented attempt to give shape and prominence to Dr. King’s conception of agape love and Coretta Scott King’s faith in the power of art, and her long life of struggle against militarism, poverty, discrimination, racism, and sexism. 

At the unveiling, Mayor Michelle Wu said, “The Embrace will be a revolutionary space… for conversation, education, and reflection on the Kings’ impact in Boston and the ideals that continue to shape the fabric of our city.…The recognition of Coretta Scott King shows that we are a city that will take on the full legacy of [the] Kings and challenge injustice everywhere from a place of love.…This memorial is a powerful call to embrace each other more, embrace our nation’s history and embrace what’s possible when we center community.”

Artist Hank Willis Thomas said, “Through embracing another person our opportunities grow. I wanted to highlight the power and beauty of coming together with another person to manifest our shared goals. I am honored to be a part of the team that has built this centerpiece and gathering place in the historic city of Boston, and the location where the Kings met.”

“The Embrace” has received mixed reviews nationally and locally. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah believed it reduced the Kings to disembodied limbs, evoking a kind of violence, “not a way to experience them in their actual corporeal fullness.” Critic Sebastian Smee noted that the absence of identifiable faces explained why some people found it ugly and distorted. Still others, like local photographer Thaddeus Miles, addressed the criticism in a more poetic, conciliatory manner:

 “I choose not to drink from the cup of cynicism, bitterness and hatred to satisfy my thirst for freedom. I prefer to drink from the cup of hope, love, unity, dreams fulfilled.”

“The Embrace” speaks to the bond between the Kings and their time in Boston. King was complicated, more confrontational, more than just the man with a dream in 1963. In the last years of his life as he spoke out against the Vietnam War and built the Poor People’s Campaign aimed at economic equity, this reporter believes that issues like increasing immigrant abuse and gun violence which torture us every day would have been urgent for him had he not been gunned down in April 1968.

Why? Had it not been for King’s efforts, there would not have been a 1964 Civil Right Act banning discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. The Voting Rights and Immigration and National Services Acts of 1965 dramatically opened entry to the United States to immigrants from Mexico and other non-European countries. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned racial discrimination in the sale of rentals or housing.

The essence of Martin Luther King was civil disobedience from 1955’s Montgomery Bus Boycotts through to the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike in April 1968. There’s a direct line that can be drawn between the “I Am a Man ” signs worn by those striking workers and protesters fighting against mass deportation and border closings in the early days of the Trump administration. We are so aware of the pain caused by words like “legal” and “illegal” when imposed by US Presidents on teenage immigrants brought to this country because of King and the Civil Rights movement.

Consider these lines from King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, 

 “I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws… Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’”

As we reflect today on King’s legacy in a United States still grappling with our indisputable “school to prison pipelines” and the pain of centuries of institutional racism, we see that the imperative to stop racial, ethnic and economic injustices belongs to all of America. 

King’s 1965 speech in Boston to the Massachusetts State Legislature prior to leading the first civil rights march from Roxbury to Boston Common decried the “twin evils of housing and employment discrimination.” At the Parkman bandstand, he spoke words that remain painfully relevant and timely 57 years later:    

“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy. Now is the time to make brotherhood a reality. Now is the time.”