Why I Choked Up—Maybe

Yesterday, Martin Luther King Day +1, like many greater Bostonians, I made the pilgrimage to downtown’s Boston Common to view the just- installed “The Embrace” sculpture. I was prepared to love this celebration of the moment when Dr. King and his wife Coretta learn he’s received the Nobel Peace Prize. And I did. I was not prepared to choke up.
The backstory to my tears: Because Monday’s snow and ice kept me from attending the sculpture’s installation, I’d read up on its backstory. To discover that its location commemorates a significant moment in Boston’s checkered civil rights history: when Dr. King spoke on Boston Common on April 23, 1965.
A senior at Wheelock College, I was there. But not to hear Dr. King!
May the story I’m about to tell illustrate more than my tiny little piece of American history: As readers of Way Opens know, in April of 1965, like most White Americans, my understanding of racism and our nation’s history was woefully ignorant. But when, the month before, Reverend James Reeb, a White Unitarian-Universalist minister, had been murdered in Selma, Alabama? That got my attention.
Here’s the point I want to make: Up until that cold and overcast April day nearly sixty years ago, I paid little attention to the civil rights movement. Vaguely aware of sit-ins, the Freedom Riders, that Dr. King visited Lynchburg, Virginia in 1962 where I was a senior in a just-desegregated high school, it took the murder of a member of my own denomination to finally break through my indifference.
BTW: Reeb’s name is inscribed on the plaza surrounding “The Embrace” alongside other Boston civil rights heroes—including Dr. Virgil Wood, still alive, I believe, whose picture graces the cover of Way Opens. Another story.
So I cried for that young, very young twenty-year old. And for of us who cannot recognize injustice nor show up at a march or demonstration or rally unless its cause relates to our own experience.
I’ll end with this: Resident of a metropolitan region infamously famous for its racism, for me that massive sculpture roused—what? grateful tears too?
I think so.