When Boston Commemorates The 1965 Freedom Rally, Trump’s Assault on Diversity takes Front Stage
King, who received his PhD in theology from Boston University and served as assistant minister at the city’s Twelfth Baptist Church, was familiar with the northeast, where the Civil Rights Movement first gained traction in 1965 with the first protest demonstration. He also met his wife, Coretta Scott King, there. She graduated from the New England Conservatory with a degree in music instruction.
During a period when Black activists were striving to desegregate housing and schools and to improve economic prospects for Black residents, King reminded the audience that he had come to Boston not to criticise the city, but to urge its leaders to do better.
To compare Massachusetts to Mississippi or to say that Boston is a Birmingham would be demagogic and dishonest,” he said to the audience. “But to ignore the threat to liberty, the denial of opportunity, and the crippling poverty that we face in some parts of this community would be morally irresponsible.”
The Boston demonstration took place months before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted (signed in August), following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which President Lyndon Johnson had won and signed. Weeks before the Boston demonstration, King and other leaders of the civil rights movement had recently returned from the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama, better known as Blood Sunday.
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