Sixty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a rally protesting housing discrimination and segregated schools in Boston, thousands of people are expected to gather at the same site to honor and reflect on the historic event.
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Martin Luther King Jr. led a rally protesting housing discrimination and segregated schools in Boston, thousands will gather Saturday at the Boston Common to honor the historic event. King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, will lead the rally.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is completely surrounded as he leads a civil rights march in Boston, April 23, 1965, en route to historic Boston Common where he will address a crowd. Wayne Lucas, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, poses at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, is interviewed at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, right, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, talks with Imari Paris Jeffries, the president and CEO of Embrace Boston, at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Civil rights marchers parade down Columbus Ave. in Boston led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., en route to historic Boston Common, April 25, 1965. Sixty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a rally protesting housing discrimination and segregated schools in Boston, thousands will gather Saturday at the Boston Common to honor the historic event. King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, will lead the rally.Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is completely surrounded as he leads a civil rights march in Boston, April 23, 1965, en route to historic Boston Common where he will address a crowd. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is completely surrounded as he leads a civil rights march in Boston, April 23, 1965, en route to historic Boston Common where he will address a crowd. Wayne Lucas, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, poses at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, poses at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, is interviewed at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, is interviewed at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, right, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, talks with Imari Paris Jeffries, the president and CEO of Embrace Boston, at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Wayne Lucas, right, who sixty years ago participated at the Freedom Rally on Boston Common, talks with Imari Paris Jeffries, the president and CEO of Embrace Boston, at the “The Embrace” sculpture on the common, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Boston. Civil rights marchers parade down Columbus Ave. in Boston led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., en route to historic Boston Common, April 25, 1965. Civil rights marchers parade down Columbus Ave. in Boston led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., en route to historic Boston Common, April 25, 1965. BOSTON — As a Black teenager growing up in Boston, Wayne Lucas vividly remembers joining some 20,000 people to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak out against the city’s segregated school system and the entrenched poverty in poor communities. Sixty years on, Lucas will be back on the Boston Common on Saturday to celebrate the anniversary of what became known as the 1965 Freedom Rally. This time, though, Lucas expects much of the focus will be on President“There’s different forms of, how do we say it, racism and also I have to include fascism, what’s going on in this country,” said Lucas, a social activist and retired postal worker who was standing on the Boston Common near the site of 20-foot-high memorial to racial equity, “The Embrace,” where the rally will be held. The rally will be preceded by a march mostly along the route taken to the Boston Common in 1965 and feature up to 125 different organizations. “People gotta be aware and say something.” he continued. “We can grumble stuff like that, but we need to take part and do something.”The original protest rally in 1965 brought the civil rights movement to the Northeast, a place King knew well from his time earning a doctorate in theology from Boston University and serving as assistant minister at the city’s Twelfth Baptist Church. It was also the place he met his wife, Coretta Scott King, who earned a degree in music education from the New England Conservatory. In his speech, King told the crowd that he returned to Boston not to condemn the city but to encourage its leaders to do better at a time when Black leaders were fighting to desegregate the schools and housing and working to improve economic opportunities for Black residents. King also implored Boston to become a leader that other cities like New York and Chicago could follow in conducting “the creative experiments in the abolition of ghettos.” “It would be demagogic and dishonest for me to say that Boston is a Birmingham, or to equate Massachusetts with Mississippi,” he told the crowd. “But it would be morally irresponsible were I to remain blind to the threat to liberty, the denial of opportunity, and the crippling poverty that we face in some sections of this community.”The Boston rally happened after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and months ahead of the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed in August. King and other civil rights movement leaders had just come off the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama, also referred to as Blood Sunday, weeks before the Boston rally. The civil rights icon also was successful in the 1963 Birmingham campaign prompting the end of legalized racial segregation in the Alabama city, and eventually throughout the nation. This time in Boston, King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, will be the keynote speaker. He and other speakers are expected to touch on some of the same issues that have plagued communities of color for decades including the need for good jobs, decent health care and affordable housing.His visit also comes at a time when the Trump administration is waging war on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in government, schools and businesses around the country, including in Massachusetts. Since his Jan. 20 inauguration, Trump has banned diversity initiatives across the federal government. The administration has launched investigations of colleges — public and private — that it accuses of discriminating against white and Asian students with race-conscious admissions programs intended to address historic inequities in access for Black students., a champion of racial diversity in the military, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brown, in the wake of Floyd’s killing,The efforts also impact Massachusetts. The state has pushed back against threats from the Trump administration to cut funding if the state doesn’t comply with an Education Department order to certify local school systems’ compliance with a race-neutral interpretation of civil rights laws. The Museum of African American History in Boston also announced earlier this month that a $500,000 federal grant received last year has been terminated. “Make no mistake, these efforts are designed to marginalize and destabilize the Museum of African American History, and African American public history institutions like us,” the museum wrote in a statement. “We are all in danger of being erased.” Martin Luther King III told The Associated Press that the attacks on diversity make little sense, noting, “We cannot move forward without understanding what happened in the past.” “It doesn’t mean that it’s about blaming people. It’s not about collective guilt. It’s about collective responsibility,” he continued. “How do we become better? Well, we appreciate everything that helped us to get to where we are. Diversity hasn’t hurt the country.” King said opponents of diversity have floated an uninformed narrative that unqualified people of color are taking jobs from white people, when the reality is they have long been denied opportunities they deserve. “I don’t know if white people understand this, but Black people are tolerant,” he said. “From knee-high to a grasshopper, you have to be five times better than your white colleague. And that’s how we prepare ourselves. So it’s never a matter of unqualified, it’s a matter of being excluded.” Imari Paris Jeffries, the president and CEO of Embrace Boston, which along with the city is putting on the rally, said the event is a chance to remind people that elements of the “promissory note” King referred to in his “I Have A Dream” speech remain “out of reach” for many people. “We’re having a conversation about democracy. This is the promissory note — public education, public housing, public health, access to public art,” Paris Jeffries said. “All of these things are a part of democracy. Those are the things that are actually being threatened right now.”Largest federal employee union, a leading Trump opponent, to lay off more than half of staff
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