As we commemorate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., WGBH News looks back at his footprint in Boston. King came to the city in 1951 to earn his Ph.D. in theology at Boston University. There he found a spiritual mentor in Howard Thurman, dean of the school's Marsh Chapel, who exposed King to the philosophy of nonviolence that Mohandas Gandhi developed in India. During his four years in Boston, King met his future wife, Coretta Scott, who was a student at the New England Conservatory of Music. He lived a couple blocks away, on Massachusetts Avenue near Symphony Hall. Through a family friend, King connected with Twelfth Baptist Church, where he occasionally preached.
After he became established as a leader of the civil rights movement, King returned to Boston several times to give speeches, make broadcast appearances, and lead a 1965 march from Roxbury to Boston Common to protest school desegregation. On that same visit, he addressed a joint session of the Massachusetts Legislature. He and his family also sometimes vacationed at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.
In this slideshow, you will see photos of his various appearances in Boston and will hear an excerpt from a 1963 speech he made at the Ford Hall Forum, then held at Jordan Hall. The speech, his third at the forum, was titled “Desegregation and the Future.” In the excerpt, King urged “whites of good will in the North to rise up with righteous indignation” about racial discrimination in their own communities. Open discrimination has faded away, but King’s message still has relevance today when it comes to structural inequities across the United States.
