‘The Embrace’: Boston Looks Ahead To MLK Memorial As Monuments Come Down Across UShttps://t.co/mZ9rzzPnZV pic.twitter.com/4RcVP9017Q
— WBZ | CBS Boston News (@wbz) January 18, 2021
I am aware that discussing Dr. King’s legacy is so very much Not My Place, but nominally I’d agree celebration is preferable to the alternative…
… “While the rest of the country is tearing down memorials to symbols that don’t represent us, Boston is building a memorial — a 22-foot, three-story high memorial — that represents who we want to be and who we want to be post-pandemic,” said King Boston Executive Director Imari Paris Jeffries. “That feels pretty darn exciting.”
‘The Embrace’ will stand at the site of the 1965 rally and march led by MLK on the Boston Common. Construction wouldn’t begin on site until March or April of 2022 because the bronze fabrication of the memorial takes about 18 months.
The memorial also celebrates King’s connection to Boston. Years before his iconic 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Boston was home to a young Martin Luther King Jr. He lived on Mass. Ave and studied at Boston University. It was there where he would earn a PhD in systematic theology and become Dr. King. Boston is also where he met Coretta Scott. For artist Hank Willis Thomas, the couple’s bond inspired the memorial that will rise in honor of their legacies…
“I think we as a city and a country have experienced an extreme amount of trauma together, it is this bonding experience we didn’t want and we never asked for and would never wish upon another generation. And the things that we’ve gotten to see and witness together has created this new urgency that I think resonates with every single person at least that’s in the Commonwealth,” said Paris Jeffries. “King’s notion of this garment of destiny and the Beloved Community resonate now more than it ever has.”…
But sometimes, the hypocrisy also needs to be called out:
you know why he’s staring at you like that right https://t.co/KWyaiSzwmw
— kilgore trout, brad r’s brother (@KT_So_It_Goes) January 18, 2021
today is the day gop lawmakers honor martin luther king jr by saying something nice about a black guy like it’s reloading their swipe card at dave and busters for the rest of the year
— kilgore trout, brad r’s brother (@KT_So_It_Goes) January 18, 2021
Today is MLK Day and my home state of Alabama still jointly commemorates it as Robert E Lee's birthday, which is a disgrace to MLK's legacy. The people who could remedy that insist that they're not racist, but they demonstrate otherwise by continuing it.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) January 18, 2021
A new film reveals how the FBI spied on Martin Luther King, shortly after he led the march on Washington in 1963.
Documentary maker Sam Pollard managed to uncover FBI documents, sourced secret White House phone calls and found forgotten footage of Kinghttps://t.co/GqHQ5EBd3f pic.twitter.com/bkfbE8WGju— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 17, 2021
Jim, Foolish Literalist
NotMax
Nonsense. His message was addressed to all Americans. The resonance may differ for you (and for me) but the theme is clear and egalitarian.
Mary G
If Dr. King was alive today, Mike Pence would be calling him a radical Marxist Communist Social Justice Warrior and a danger to the safety of our nation. Or have him in jail.
HumboldtBlue
@Mary G:
So all we get is re-runs?
TS (the original)
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Checking the twitter I found a reply referencing – of all people – George Will – who wrote a piece in Wapo back in 2018.
Trump is no longer the worst person in Government
I am eternally reminded of the obsequious Uriah Heep.
NotMax
Perhaps not his entire life but by that time J. Edgar was a sick, sick, twisted man, mired in the treacherously idealized wisps of an antediluvian world.
piratedan
If nothing else, MLK is a welcome reminder for me to continually check myself and understand that even my white privilege seeps into this ability to post with few repercussions, knowing that even if I support and seek social justice; that there’s no way to improve the past. Only to resolve to work for a better present and future for everyone.
prostratedragon
The Morehouse College Glee Club:
“We Shall Overcome,” arr. Wendell Whalum
gwangung
Of course you can discuss Dr. King’s legacy.
And if you get some parts wrong, or if you’re incomplete, you’ll get corrections.
By and large, Black Americans understand and appreciate Dr. King the best…but his words and philosophy are not closed off to other Americans.
prostratedragon
@NotMax: Not clear that he was ever, shall we say, properly motivated. A story fresh in my mind that I just recently learned was how he blew up an operation against Nazi spies on Allied shipping during WWII, in order to get the glory headlines from rolling them up. It’s in this PBS documentary “The Codebreaker” about cryptanalyst Elizabeth Smith Friedman, at about minute 41.
John Revolta
@TS (the original): Will’s full of crap. Trump didn’t want Pence; he considered him a loser. It was Manafort who convinced Trump to choose him, allegedly with Melania’s help. Who was behind them is left as an exercise for the reader.
TS (the original)
@John Revolta: Regardless of whether trump wanted pence or not – he is still well defined in that passage.
West of the Rockies
@Mary G:
True. And yet I’ve encountered several Republicans asserting that MLK was actually a conservative, thank you very much. They are always trying to change history… “Bush wasn’t really a Republican, McCarthy was a fair and honest person,” etc.
John Revolta
@TS (the original): Granted. (I’m a big fan of “oleaginous”.)
mrmoshpotato
Well, this is an open thread so…
Gave me a good laugh.
Amir Khalid
@West of the Rockies:
As I understand it, Dr King was a Republican, as were many black Americans then. But he would surely have been a liberal Republican, given his views on social justice, and liberals don’t exist in the Republican party of today.
West of the Rockies
As of this writing, in 1 day and four hours, the wretched pig man will leave the WH forever.
Awaiting him will be diminishing health, a gordian knot of legal troubles, decreased brain function, dozens of books, articles, and news features that reveal his avarice and failure, and pain–physical and emotional–as he ages and approaches irrelevance and much-feared death.
Ha, huh-ha, ha, HA!
West of the Rockies
@Amir Khalid:
That is true. Lincoln may have been Republican, too, but that term has been going through utter transformation and metamorphosis since 1960.
mrmoshpotato
@West of the Rockies: And the Soviet shitpile mobster conman will be remembered (if we hate part of our memories) as a TRAITOR!
(No one better pipe up with that “Those who forget history…” line.)
Less than 32 hours to go.
sab
@Amir Khalid: The modern Republican party is just the Dixiecrats and Big Business. All the other Republicans have been driven out.
The Dixiecrats are the old southern Democrats who were Democrats because they hated Lincoln and everything he stood for. In the 1960s they became disenchanted with the Democratic party because of what LBJ was doing for civil rights. Nixon’s southern strategy brought them into the Republican party.
Amir Khalid
@West of the Rockies:
And these days there are not many Republicans describing themselves as Lincoln Republicans, are there.
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
To be fair, for many GOP voters the meaning of the term ‘Lincoln Republican’ has done a 180 to mean “N*##*r-loving, Big Government, Do-Gooder” and sounds like a threat.
Generations of pretty consistent propaganda can screw people up.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
I wonder if they have any “My Pillow”s available in the prison commissary.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
31 hrs.
Feathers
Ugh. I believe in honoring MLK, but I hate this sort of shitty public art “memorials” with the passion of a thousand suns. There isn’t that much public space for the urban population. To take that space and steal it from the future to show our reverence for MLK, or the Irish Potato Famine, or a massacre somewhere far away. They just keep taking over parks and commons. Parks should be parks. Statues are OK, if well sited and not impeding the general use of the park as a park.
Some of this is watching the DC malls, post Vietnam memorial, get turned from a great public space into a mire of kitschy “memorials” culminating in the WWII monstrosity, which in many ways presaged the fascist turn we’ve experienced. FDR got the memorial he wanted, a granite block the size of his desk. Somebody thought it was a good idea to build a mini theme park on the Mall. Also, traveling around the UK and seeing memorials everywhere to their imperial wars, Crimea and the Boers, made me realize that these memorials are not signs of a healthy society. Things both good and bad falling away and being forgotten is the normal way of life. “ Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Like I said above, it’s not MLK, I detest these things on principle.
prostratedragon
@mrmoshpotato: I’ve been bookmarking articles on the last gasp shenanigans under “Crescendo.” As of last week I’ve added the heading “Diminuendo.”
prostratedragon
Field of flags on the Mall.
Platonicspoof
This was painful to read, but combines Jesmyn Ward’s loss of her husband, possibly from Covid (or very similar), endless reasons for MLK, BLM and other protests and ” . . . I found myself commanded to amplify the voices of the dead . . .”
A Vanity Fair article.
via @ClementineAbel on a twitter thread.
rikyrah
@NotMax:
There were FBI files on MLK, his father AND his grandfather??
rikyrah
@prostratedragon:
?????
Bed-Stuy Baby
@Amir Khalid: Dr. King was not a Republican. His daughter said so and she should know.
sab
@Bed-Stuy Baby: I thought that Dr King’s father was Republican and King Jr broke from that tradition.
Ruckus
@West of the Rockies:
He has brain function?
It isn’t within a million miles of normal, what little he has.