“This work is really about the capacity for each of us to be enveloped in love, and I feel enveloped in love every time I hear the names and see the faces of Dr. [Martin Luther] King and Coretta Scott King,” New York artist Hank Willis Thomas has said of “The Embrace,” his 20-foot-tall monument to the Kings on Boston Common.
The sculpture and new granite plaza were unveiled on Jan. 13 along the Tremont Street end of the park. The project was commissioned by Embrace Boston (the renamed King Boston nonprofit, founded by tech entrepreneur Paul English, who launched the project with a $1 million donation of his own money), the Boston Foundation and the City of Boston. Mass Design Group assisted in the design, which includes the names of civil rights and justice leaders from the Boston area in the bronze in the ground of the granite plaza.
“By highlighting the act of embrace, this sculpture shifts the emphasis from a singular hero worship to collective action, imploring those curious enough to investigate closer,” the artist’s website says.
Signs around the sculpture plaza say, “The story began in Boston. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King met in Boston in 1952. ‘The Embrace’ is a memorial to their love and leadership.”
The couple met while King was earning a doctorate in systematic theology from Boston University and Coretta Scott was studying opera at New England Conservatory of Music. Thomas’s design is taken from a photo of the couple embracing when Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Signs around the plaza read, “It reflects the power of collective action, the role of women in the freedom movement, and the forging of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability.”
In April 1965, King led a civil rights march of 22,000 people from Roxbury to Boston Common’s nearby Parkman Bandstand. King told the crowd that day, “The vision of the New Boston must extend into the heart of Roxbury. Boston must become a testing ground for the ideas of freedom.”
