Winning Memorial Selected to Honor MLK (GRS’55, Hon.’59) on Boston Common
Bronze statue depicts his and Coretta King’s arms in The Embrace
BU contributed $250,000 to a Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) commemoration that will include this statue on the Boston Common. Photo by Hank Willis Thomas Studio/MASS Design Group
The partnership between Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who met while King was studying at BU, will be remembered with a towering bronze sculpture on the Boston Common. Titled The Embrace, the couple’s interlocking arms will stand 22 feet in height.
Chosen from five finalists, the winning design, by artist Hank Willis Thomas, was announced Monday by King Boston, a nonprofit overseeing the work. The sculpture is part of a multipronged initiative to commemorate the Kings’ Boston connections. Boston University contributed $250,000 from alumni and friends to the King initiative.
Thomas, who designed the piece with MASS Design Group, told the Boston Globe that he was inspired by photos of the Kings showing, during times private and public, the “intimacy between the two of them.”
“I am proud to see a project selected that embodies the spirit of love and compassion that the Kings demonstrated throughout their lives,” Boston Mayor Martin Walsh said in a statement, adding that the monument will be a gathering place and an impetus for “recommitting us to fulfill their dream of equality for all.”
The Embrace, to be completed by early next year, will cost $5 million of the total $12 million planned for the memorial initiative to the Kings. Perhaps as much as any city other than Birmingham, Ala., Boston had an outsized influence on MLK’s life. He came to Boston in 1951 to study philosophy and ethics at BU, eventually earning a PhD in systematic theology. During his studies, encouraged by a friend, he went on a date with a young woman named Coretta Scott, who was studying opera at the New England Conservatory of Music. They would marry in 1953, and Coretta Scott King carried on his legacy for nearly 40 years after his 1968 assassination, until her death in 2006.
Besides the sculpture, the memorial initiative will include a center in Boston’s Roxbury area that will focus on the slain leader’s efforts to redress economic inequality; $1 million for King-related programs at Roxbury’s Twelfth Baptist Church, the house of worship where King preached while pursuing his doctorate at BU; and a documentary about the Kings and their life together by Roberto Mighty (CAS’76). Mighty was the nation’s first artist-in-residence at a burial ground, having served in that capacity at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass.
The erection of the statue will coincide with a $28 million upgrade of Boston Common. It was selected from 126 designs submitted for the competition.
The other four finalists were a granite monument of a pulpit; a pair of light- and sound-emitting beacons on rippled ground; a peace walkway with benches, a fountain, and a reflecting pool; and a black stone overlook above an amphitheater of mountainous sculptures.
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