The King Boston memorial, The Embrace, will be anchored on Boston Common, where, in 1965, Dr. King called Boston to live by its highest ideals. The Common, America’s first public park, has a vibrant 400-year-old history and a tradition of civic gatherings. The new memorial will spark a new public conversation about how to advance racial and social justice in Boston today.
When it is dedicated, currently planned for 2022, the Embrace will provide a living space for conversation, education and reflection on the racial and economic justice ideals of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and serve as a permanent monument to the Kings’ time in Boston, a period in which they met and fell in love, and which helped shape their approach to a just and equitable society.
The concept of a memorial to the Kings has been alive in Boston for decades, and a memorial to Dr. King is already in place at Boston University, but entrepreneur Paul English jumpstarted the effort to honor Martin and Coretta together with a financial commitment to a memorial in 2017. Paul and his co-chair, Rev. Liz Walker, pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church, convened an Art Committee of renowned educators, visual artists and curators rooted in the Black art tradition to help shepherd the design process, and coordinated an extensive series of meetings in neighborhoods across Boston to get public input into the best ways to celebrate and advance the Kings’ work in Boston.
126 teams from around the world submitted plans for a memorial. The Art Committee whittled that number down to five finalists, whose concepts were shared for public input at the Boston Public Library, the Bruce C. Bolling Bulilding in Roxbury and online in the summer of 2018. Around 1,000 public comments were received and catalogued. Of the five finalists, three designs were advanced to the feasibility stage, where a cooperative team of reviewers from King Boston and the City of Boston reviewed the practicality of each design.
And on March 4, 2019, the King Boston Art Committee announced that it had selected The Embrace, by artist Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group, as the design for a memorial to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King, to be sited on Boston Common.