The Lewd Reviews of Boston’s MLK Statue Have It Wrong

T he Embrace, a new bronze sculpture honoring Martin Luther King Jr., premiered last week in Boston. It’s located on Boston Common, the 50-acre park, owned in common by the public, that’s as old as Boston itself. Once used for grazing cows, it’s now a park, rallying point, and green lungs for the city, as well as the front yard of the State House and Beacon Hill. King spoke at a rally on the Common in 1965. About 22,000 people attended, a big crowd for Boston.

Hank Willis Thomas (b. 1976) designed the sculpture. He’s a very good photographer and conceptual artist who does work related to the black male body and the diversity of black men’s opinions and aspirations. A local group called Embrace Boston led the charge in making the sculpture happen.

I drove to Boston to see it since I can’t write about anything without seeing it. I think it’s fine. It’s a different kind of memorial sculpture, which is good. I think people will come to love it.

Thomas sourced the 22-foot-tall, 19-ton bronze sculpture from a photograph of King and his wife, Coretta, smiling and embracing, after the minister and civil-rights leader won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. Thomas excised everything from the image except the couple’s arms and hands. We understand clearly that it’s a man and a woman, though I doubt anyone beyond an inner circle knows the photograph. They will now.

This vignette, Thomas said, “is the embodiment of a beloved community” and a symbol of love’s power to soothe rancor. Thomas said the sculpture asks whether we can “embrace each other” in an atmosphere like today’s, when “‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ are reductive terms that are divide-and-conquer strategies.”

I assume that the original image was photoshopped, imagined as a three-dimensional sculpture, scanned, and cast. It cost $10 million. That’s a boatload of money, given the needs of Boston’s children. The city and its teachers’-union masters screwed them during the Covid hysteria, hypnosis, and months of lazy days and inferior online classes. Embrace Boston commissioned the sculpture in 2019, so we can’t fault it for a tin ear.

Since it’s public art, The Embrace rallied the art critic in all of us. “Jelly donut, with no jelly,” one wrote on Twitter, free again for open debate and rivers of snark. “Two butt cheeks pulled apart,” I read somewhere else. “It looks like an engorged penis” is getting the most circulation. Seneca Scott, Mrs. King’s cousin, called it “a masturbatory metal homage.” He added, “So Boston now has a big bronze penis that’s supposed to represent black love at its purist and most devotional.” Tucker Carlson said, “It’s not art, it’s a middle finger.”

Thomas, interviewed on CNN, objected to what he called “perverse readings” of the work. “To bring that to King’s legacy,” he said, “to dictate King’s legacy and the making of art seems strange to me.” Thomas, alas, got stuck on the first syllable of “dictate,” a lapsus linguae we can forgive — but it’s too funny to forget.

Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott met in Boston in 1952 when she was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music and he was an assistant minister at the Twelfth Baptist Church. They married in 1953. King got his Ph.D. from Boston University in 1955. So there’s a Boston connection.

I didn’t know much about Mrs. King aside from the photograph of her at King’s funeral, where she’s a beacon of grace under pressure. I didn’t realize how involved she was in King’s ministry and his political advocacy, but she was consequential in both. Wives and husbands of movers and shakers most times don’t get the salutes they deserve.

I think the sculpture confuses because the Kings aren’t known as a political couple. And Heathcliff and Catherine, Paolo and Francesca, Fred and Ginger, they’re not. So the sculpture seems counterintuitive. I know King might have been a wolf. Who knows, and who cares? No one thought of Mrs. King as King’s partner in his civil-rights work. I think they do now, and that’s good.

The sculpture’s sponsoring organization, Embrace Boston, pushes the equity-and-inclusion scam. It was founded to develop and fund the King memorial, but that was a few years ago when King’s core message — judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin — was civil-rights gospel.

Now, Embrace Boston seems to reject King even as it celebrates him. Reading its website, I see it has abandoned “racialized and colorblind norms,” which seems a message in conflict, and aims to move “toward organizational cultures and practices grounded in equity, joy, and well-being.” Clearing the warm and fuzzy thicket, this means that race explains everything. Embrace Boston’s next big project, aside from raising money to support a big staff, is reparations.

I looked at its list of donors. It’s the usual crowd of Boston corporations paying protection money and local Chardonnay socialists. Nowhere is this cartel more destructive and narcissistic than in Boston.

Embrace Boston and the city probably picked the wrong time to unveil the sculpture. I know it’s King’s birthday and a holiday but, really, an outdoor event in Boston in January? “Bleak” is one word describing mid-January in the Hub. It’s raw, too, both cold and damp. There’s always the risk of a snowstorm, but this year Boston has next to no snow, so the Common is bare and brown. When I saw it, it had a bit of white on it following six inches of snowfall. Lots of mud.

The anniversary of King’s speech on the Common — April 23 — would have been better. Spring in Boston is pleasant, with flowers and shrubs starting to bloom, trees with leaves, and green grass. The Embrace’s rich, confident palette is meant to complement the landscape, so it will look its best then. This year, April 23 is a Sunday. It’s also the end of the week that starts with Patriot’s Day, the unique Massachusetts holiday marking Paul Revere’s ride. Saluting two freedom fighters, one from deep history, one from our time, is an edifying touch.

The sculpture isn’t the orthodox, boring figure looking blankly, cold and dead. That’s a good change. It’s got warmth and humanity.

It’s physical and gestural. Looking at it, I don’t see what that tweet called “an engorged penis.” What indeed does he have on his mind? The Embrace is big, and it’s three-dimensional, so isolating parts of it is going to happen. I focused on the hands, on the sense of touch, but also on the whole, which is rhythmic and reminds me of Rodin. I think that once it goes through changes in seasons, and people forget the unserious criticism of it, The Embrace will be a destination. Love and freedom are two sides of the same coin.