The wait for artist Hank Willis Thomas and MASS Design Group’s public memorial to Martin Luther King on the Boston Common finally ended over the weekend with a ribbon-cutting ceremony that included the sculpture's design team and a host of local political dignitaries.

They were on hand to witness the unveiling of Thomas’ monumental The Embrace sculpture that now sits at the southern edge of America’s oldest public park in the newly-created 1965 Freedom Plaza, a short distance away from the 236-year-old statehouse and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. By rights, putting the legacy of its subjects in proper place alongside the Hub’s other paragons of social justice causes from centuries past.  

Dr. King met his wife, the late Coretta Scott King, at Boston University’s Myles Standish Hall while the two were both graduate students at different institutions in early 1952. Thomas wanted to create a lasting monument to the intimacy and abounding life’s partnership present in a photo taken of the couple following Dr. King’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1964 and — in spite of critical skepticism — has succeeded in giving a still deeply segregated metropolis of just under 1 million people an inspirational 20-by-25-foot embronzed testimony to the power of relationships, kindness, and love.

King himself once said that love is “somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.” Thomas wanted to differentiate between traditional memorials to King depicting him as a singular messianic figure in the hopes of using this notion in order to deliver a message about the role of women, empathy, sentiment, and vulnerability in creating the bonds which the eventual realization of King’s vision for a “person-oriented society” must in the end sustain.

“From ideation to creation, building The Embrace was an exercise in intention,” MASS Design Principal Jonathan Evans added finally. 

The memorial will open fully to the public in February. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu's office said in a press announcement that the plaza will “serve as a stepping off point into an anti-racist, welcoming, and radically equitable Boston as the City approaches its 400th anniversary in 2030.”