9 News Holding Each Other

A new sculpture and plaza on the Boston Common honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and legacy.

MASS Design Group, in collaboration with the City of Boston and local nonprofit Embrace Boston, has unveiled a sculpture and supporting landscape on the Boston Common honoring civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Embrace, an artwork by Brooklyn artist Hank Willis Thomas, sits in the middle of the 6,000-square-foot 1965 Freedom Rally Memorial Plaza, a circular area decorated with over 1,300 granite stone pavers arranged in a quilted star pattern symbolizing collectivity and unity. The pattern responds to a passage from King’s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail about how people are “tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Close to the sculpture, the ground rises and falls to create circular seating near The Embrace for visitors to reflect on King’s activism and message. A wall encircling the plaza features a quote from King’s wife, Coretta Scott King.

MASS worked with Embrace Boston, which honors and advances the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, on the plan for the sculpture and surrounding plaza, which is located in Boston Common.

Solicitations for the project began at the end of 2017, when Embrace Boston put out a request for proposals for a public monument. In March 2019, it chose The Embrace, a proposal from Willis Thomas, out of more than 100 submissions. In 2021, the Boston

Art Commission voted to approve the final design of the memorial.

“The Embrace is a testament to what we can achieve when we come together,” the artist said in a press release. “The sculpture embodies people’s capacity for love, change, and hope for the future.”

The massive 38,000-pound, 20-by-25-foot bronze sculpture depicts the way the Kings held each other after Dr. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Made from more than 600 individual pieces, the sculpture is the first new monument on the Common in over 30 years.

A bronze plaque erected within the plaza honors 64 of Boston’s civil rights leaders who joined Dr. King in the fight for equality and civil rights.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King met and married in Boston while they were students. A little over a decade later, on April 23, 1965, Dr. King stood on the Common to address a crowd of 22,000, calling on the city and its leaders to live up to its highest ideals.

“The Embrace will be a revolutionary space in our country’s oldest public park for conversation, education, and reflection on the Kings’ impact in Boston and the ideals that continue to shape the fabric of our city,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in a press announcement.

Martin Luther King III shared via a press release that his “parents’ time in Bos- ton is regularly a forgotten part of their history—and the history of the movement they helped inspire. The Embrace is a commemoration of their relationship and journey and represents the meaningful role Boston served in our history.” of Destiny, with the Kings surrounded and uplifted by local civil rights heroes from Boston, it’s the scale, the optimism, the authenticity, the honesty of it,” MASS Design Group principal and lead architect Jonathan Evans added. “You can’t help but feel something. You can’t help but want to actually do something about it. It’s a call to action.” AW

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