On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, local advocacy organizations are calling attention to King's time in Boston and working to advance his mission. King Boston is the group behind a planned memorial to King and his wife Coretta Scott King. The couple met in Boston while King was getting his Ph.D. at Boston University and Scott was attending the New England Conservatory of Music. The memorial, which will honor other local civil rights leaders as well, is scheduled to be unveiled on Boston Common next year.
King Boston is also establishing the King Center for Economic Justice, headquartered in Roxbury, where King was a congregant at the Twelfth Baptist Church. Speaking with GBH All Things Considered host Arun Rath, King Boston executive director Imari Paris Jeffries said the center will be dedicated to advancing social justice causes amid what he and others have referred to as a "third Reconstruction," illustrated by the racial inequities of the coronavirus crisis, overt disenfranchisement efforts, myriad incidents of police brutality, and an accompanying surge in activism.
"I think we are experiencing that in Boston," said Jeffries, "with the emergence of several prominent both civic and political leaders of color, and attitudes around inclusion and racial equity in Boston."
Jeffries said the center will build on the work of grassroots organizers moved to action by a fraught national moment in which many have been forced to reckon with the past and present of American racism.
"People feel like they're losing their country," said Jeffries, "but in fact, they're not losing their country, because this is our country as well. And so they're being invited to imagine a country where folks have equal opportunity and equal access to prosperity and liberty. And so that's that's what we're asking for. That's what we're demanding in this moment in time."
Jeffries noted that just as current activists are facing fierce blowback now, Martin Luther King Jr. and the goals he espoused were denigrated by opponents of the civil rights movement. Jeffries said that while a sanitized image of King has been embraced in the decades following his assassination, a majority of white people rejected him while he was alive.
"In the sixties, two-thirds of white people thought negatively of Dr. King. Many, many folks who were surveyed after he was murdered thought that he brought it on himself, based on his work," Jeffries said.
Jeffries said that the country and the state have a unique chance to embrace and advance King's mission while highlighting his ties to Boston.
"Now is the time for us to activate around being in a Commonwealth where all of us are welcomed, all of us are included," said Jeffries. "We have an opportunity in Massachusetts to be the first city, the first state in the country, to create this city on the hill that we all aspire for that King talked about."
