Where civil rights icon and his wife met, studied, a memorial will rise
BOSTON — A major memorial honoring Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King is moving forward in Boston, where they met and studied in the 1950s.
King Boston, the privately funded organization coordinating the estimated $9.5 million project, said this week that fabrication of a roughly 22-foot-high bronze sculpture depicting four arms embracing is expected to begin in March after years of planning.
When unveiled late next year, “The Embrace” will be one of the country’s largest new memorials dedicated to racial equity, the organization says. It will be installed on Boston Common near the site of a 1965 rally and march led by King, who would have turned 92 on Friday.
Imari Paris Jeffries, King Boston’s executive director, said organizers hope their broader effort serves as a model for how public monuments can spark positive action in the wake of the national reckoning on racism sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year.
Besides the King memorial, the organization is also raising money to build an economic justice center in Roxbury, a historically Black neighborhood in Boston where King preached. It also plans to launch an annual gathering exploring issues of race and equity.
Dr. Vicki Crawford, director of the MLK collection at Morehouse College, the civil right’s leader’s alma mater in Atlanta, Georgia, said the Boston project also stands out because it honors the sizeable contributions of Coretta Scott King alongside her husband.
She founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta and led the successful push to make his birthday a national holiday after his assassination in 1968.
“She hasn’t received adequate recognition for institutionalizing his philosophy of nonviolence,” Crawford said. “He could not have done it without her by his side.”
King Boston was launched in 2017 to address what organizers viewed as a glaring deficiency, considering King spent some of his formative years in Boston. The Georgia native earned a doctorate in theology from Boston University and was assistant minister at the city’s Twelfth Baptist Church.
The memorial effort was later broadened to honor Coretta Scott King, who earned a degree in music education from the New England Conservatory.