(This story has been updated with information about an upcoming report.)
WALKING THROUGH the Boston Common, the towering bronze sculpture is hard to miss. Stories-tall winding metal depicts the embracing arms of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.
A year after the monument first rose up in the Common, Embrace Boston president and CEO Imari Paris Jeffries is “even more affirmed that we made the right decision” about the design. It can be touched, walked through, played under. From above, the disembodied arms form the shape of Irish love knots.
It was a controversial choice, recognizing King with a statue in which his face is nowhere to be seen, and a far cry from the man-on-plinth structures that pepper commons around the country.
“This embodied experience of monuments – this great person, great man, rendition of monuments that we’ve been socialized into – has been the way that we have experienced monuments in this country and arguably the world,” Paris Jeffries said on The Codcast. “And we said, you know what, we have to think about the other ways in which the American monument story can be built.”
Embrace Boston isn’t done rethinking monuments.
The organization, which started under The Boston Foundation with the discrete purpose of bringing an MLK statue to Boston, expanded its vision during 2020 as the state locked down and protests against police brutality streamed through cities. It also aimed to raise money for the Historic Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, King’s church during his Boston years, and build a still-to-come center in Roxbury.
Now it’s breaking out on its own to form a stand-alone nonprofit, planning for a staff of 15 by the summer, and expecting to raise millions of dollars for research, community building, and other public art.
“We are in a dangerous, scary time in our country,” Paris Jeffries said, “on the eve of another presidential election with multiple war wars across the world. We’re banning books and theories and we’re banning people’s ability to control their own bodies and destinies.”
He sees art installations and monuments as “analog cookies,” signals about the people and values that a country raises up.
The division and strife, he said, mean “those analog cookies that exist across the country have been working. I think we have to build other ones that say something else. The Embrace is one of those things that says something else.”
As a stand-alone nonprofit, Paris Jeffries says the vision continues, along with policy and artistic pushes in the city. He highlighted Embrace’s involvement in the coalition that led to Boston’s reparations task force. The organization will release its 2024 Harm Report, “a comprehensive document delving into seven injury areas of significant historical and contemporary consequence for Black Boston,” on February 27, coinciding with the inaugural Embrace Black History symposium event.
Boston has been reckoning with its past in a painfully public way – rethinking Faneuil Hall, named after a white supremacist who traded and owned slaves. The bronze “Emancipation Group” statue, which depicted President Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling formerly enslaved man, was removed in 2020. A Boston Globe exploration of the infamous Charles Stuart case burst onto pages, screens, and podcasts this winter.
“I think when you might be new here and you say, ‘Well, this is a city that has a woman mayor and diverse cabinet chiefs and all woman leadership team from the governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, attorney general. I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Paris Jeffries said.
Yet, “ghosts live in the bones of our city,” he said. “And there are still people who’ve been here for a long time. And I think we are in a moment where we have to reconcile that past and the type of distrust that exists in some of the systems and infrastructure of the city that has long forgotten some communities. And so, while people who are new here might experience a different Boston, I think that there are people who are from here that have experienced a Boston that is hard to forget.”
As an organization, he sees Embrace’s team as “concierges of this work, to help open doors, doors that are closest to where the people are.”
They are eyeing two additional monuments in the city. The first, Paris Jeffries hopes, will be at the site of the former Emancipation statue and involve rotating interpretations of what emancipation means. They would like to commission a new artist each year to create a statue for the podium.
Another will go at the promised King center in Roxbury. They expect to open the National Embrace Center in 2027 or 2028, at a Nubian Square parcel set for a major mixed-used development, Paris Jeffries said.
Permanence and change are complicated concepts in a city as old and history-focused as Boston, he said.
“When you have a monument that tells a story on the Freedom Trail – this historic site of freedom that is stretched throughout the central parts of Boston – that tells a story or multiple stories of these other leaders, it’s part of this expanding narrative that we’re trying to shift,” he said. “And so there’s an intentionality around that, in both telling the story of these unsung heroes and not thinking about the Kings as these godlike creatures in a vacuum.”
But time moves.
“We are allowed, as human beings, to be changing our minds,” he said. He compares the monuments in some ways to the shift in music technology, from his 13-year-old self making mixtapes to his 51-year-old current self tweaking a Spotify playlist.
“We evolve, and our ideas evolve,” Paris Jeffries said. “And so, like in this digital world, the physical world also can model how that evolution can take place.”