Thursday marks one year since the city of Boston lost Melvin King, a longtime community advocate, state legislator and Boston’s first Black mayoral candidate to advance to a general election.
One year after her father’s death, Pamela King says she still feels his presence.
“I see him smiling, I see that he’s at peace,” King told GBH News. “It’s left this void over the past year, but it hasn’t stopped us from doing the work, from keeping it going. He wouldn’t have wanted everything to just stop.”
One of Boston’s most renowned advocates for communities of color, King died at 94 in his South End home on March 28, 2023. His legacy lives on through the foundations he built throughout his career, including his post as director of the New Urban League of Greater Boston, where King created job training and opportunities for employment. In 1997, he established the South End Technology Center, which continues to serve as a community space and provide computer training to low-income communities.
Rev. Dr. Jay Williams, the lead pastor at Union United Methodist Church who officiated King’s funeral service last year, says he calls upon King’s spirit for hope and strength in the face of so much unrest and conflict in the world.
“The spirits of the ancestors walk beside us, and King is an ancestor who we invoke and call upon in the midst of really difficult times,” he said. “In a world that seems on fire from Gaza to Haiti to Ukraine and Moscow, we see so much devastation. But we can’t give up because we have to honor our ancestors as we continue to do the work that we’re called to today.”
King lost to Ray Flynn in the 1983 mayoral election, after breaking barriers to become the first Black candidate to make it that far. In 2003, King created The New Majority, a program uniting Boston’s communities of color around candidates for election.
As a state representative, King helped organize the People Before Highways movement, a community-led protest against development that threatened to displace Roxbury residents in the 1960s. In 1968, King helped organize a sit-in at the Boston Redevelopment Authority office in protest of a proposal to replace housing in the South End with a parking garage. In the following days, King led hundreds of protesters to camp out in an occupation of the lot known as “tent city,” the moniker later given to a housing complex established at the site in 1988.
“The Tent City project is the shining star of King’s work around affordable housing and community organizing, born up out of the community rising up and resisting,” Williams said. “A lot of organizing is happening now around the Affordable Homes Act, given the housing crisis. That’s one of many examples of how King’s work continues to mobilize people today.”
Pamela King says her father would be proud to see the work of advocates across the state, who continue to grapple with the intersecting crises of homelessness, housing inaccessibility and a strain on resources due to an influx of migrants seeking shelter.
“He would always want to make sure that people got housed, they got fed, and they had opportunities,” she said. “If he was still here, he would be opening up spaces for people. His parents instilled in him this idea that you don’t just throw people away. If they need some help, help.”
In the days leading up to his death, Pamela King sat by her father’s bed, listening to stories about growing up in the South End in the 1930s or sneaking into jazz clubs with his friends.
“I miss having those conversations, and now I can’t see him. I can’t go and touch him,” she said.
Her father’s death has brought new significance to the stories shared at family gatherings, King said, particularly those from Olga King, his last surviving sibling.
“She helps us keep remembering,” she said, “so we still have some history to hold on to.”
