BOSTON (JTA) – A month after Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel stood on the front lines of the 1965 march from Selma, Alabama, to demand voting rights for African Americans, another march begins in Boston Happened.
There, on April 23, 1965, King led more than 20,000 people in a march from the Roxbury to Boston Common, the city’s historically black neighborhood. They stretched for nearly a mile, in a historic moment for Boston and its black community.
Now, in honor of both King’s birthday and the 50th anniversary of Heschel’s death, the Boston Common is home to the Travelers again. On Friday, Jewish Bostonians and allies marched from the nearby Central Reform Temple to the park for the city’s dedication of a new monument to King and his wife and civil rights companion Coretta Scott King.
“We thought this would be a wonderful moment to rekindle the alliance between the African American civil rights community and the Jewish community,” Rabbi Michael Scherer, the synagogue’s rabbi and a faculty member at the Hebrew College, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a phone call. told. a few days before the event.
King had professional and personal ties to the city he came to call his second home. He earned his PhD in theology from Boston University. It was also where King first met and courted Coretta Scott, who was pursuing her master’s degree at the New England Conservatory of Music.
The Embrace, a massive sculpture and public monument designed by renowned artist Hank Willis Thomas, honors the couple’s legacy and the town’s role in their lives.
Unveiled on Friday, the 20-foot-tall bronze sculpture embracing King was inspired by a photograph taken in 1964, shortly after the announcement that King had been selected for the Nobel Peace Prize.
A passerby walks past ‘The Embrace’, a memorial 20-foot-tall bronze sculpture to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, on the Boston Common, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023, in Boston. (AP/Steven Senn)
Imari K., executive director of Embrace Boston, the non-profit leading the memorial. According to Paris Jefferies, The Embrace is the largest American-made bronze sculpture in the country.
“It’s Boston’s Statue of Liberty,” he told WBUR.
The procession, which included about 100 people, was meant to spark ties between the two stalwarts of the faith and the black and Jewish communities represented by the Selma March, when Heschel famously carried the Torah scroll.
The rain cleared enough for Boston Jews to carry their own Torahs, which were carried in part of the week, to mark the beginning of the Book of Exodus. “This is a story of freedom and liberation,” Shire said before the procession. “As we march today, we will think about how this story is present in all of our lives.”
Synagogue board member Jill Silverstein, who founded her Racial Justice Committee in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, said committee members studied slavery and racism today, and engaged in self-reflection, Silverstein said. , who watched the monument’s progress from his home nearby and called it “exquisite and different”. He said Friday’s march, which the synagogue group discussed with Embrace Boston leaders, is the first step in taking action as partners with others to combat racism.
“It’s rekindling our commitment to racial justice, equity and equality,” Silverstein said.
March comes at a moment of challenge. According to watchdog groups, anti-Semitic incidents and sentiments are on the rise; Boston has been home to several in recent years, including the stabbing of a rabbi in 2021 that ignited shows of solidarity within the Jewish community. What’s more, several recent episodes have challenged Black-Jewish relations, including an extended antisemitic outburst by rapper Kanye West and the promotion of an antisemitic film by NBA star Kyrie Irving.
Emmanuel Church, an Episcopal congregation where the synagogue is located, and Congregation Mishkan Tefilah, a Conservative synagogue in Brooklyn, were early participants in the event that the two synagogues intended as a first step in deepening their work with black churches on racial issues. Let’s keep and economic justice.
Rabbi Marcia Plumb of Mishkan Tefilah said in an email, “In this climate of antisemitism and racism, Blacks and Jews need to speak up in support of each other and against hate and prejudice.” (Sahul and Shire are married to each other.)
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joins hands with other civil rights leaders as they begin the march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery on March 21, 1965. Demonstrators are marching for voter registration rights for blacks. With Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (fourth from right) to his left are United Nations Undersecretary Ralph Bunche, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. (AP Photo)
Among others who marched were Rabbi Jim Morgan, who leads congregations for residents at Harvard Hillel, and Hebrew Senior Life communities, who sent a handful of residents to the event.
“There are people in my community who participated in the civil rights movement in the 1960s,” Morgan said.
Other sponsors include the American Jewish Committee of New England; Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston; Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action; The Miller Center at the Hebrew College and the Center Community of Brookline, Hebrew senior living residences.
On Friday evening, Reverend Liz Walker, co-chair of the Embrace Boston Committee and pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church, will speak at Central Reform’s Friday Night Shabbat service,
Walker, one of Boston’s most prominent black clergy members, told JTA by phone, “This moment is almost beyond words … because of what the Kings meant to Boston.” She said she plans to speak about how, in a time of division and polarization, a monument “that speaks of love, unity, courage and justice” stands tall.
Describing King and Heschel as prophetic voices, Walker said, “Those relationships [between faith leaders and the community] They are more important than ever and have to be lifted up as they are going to guide the world through the territory of such negativity and hostility.