Boston celebrates the 60 year anniversary of 1965 Freedom Rally at a time when the Trump administration is waging war on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in government, schools and businesses around the country.
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 was back on the Boston Common on Saturday to celebrate the anniversary of what became known as the 1965 Freedom Rally. This time, though, much of the focus was on President Donald Trump and concerns that the commander-in-chief is exploiting divisions and fears about race and immigration.
“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,” Lucas said in an interview before the rally.
The gathering drew several hundred people on a rainy and windy day. It was preceded by a march by a smaller group of people, mostly along the route taken to the Boston Common in 1965. Up to 125 different organizations took part.
“People gotta be aware and say something.” he continued. “We can grumble (and) stuff like that, but we need to take part and do something.”
1965 protest brings civil rights movement to the Northeast
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.”
Rally followed Civil Rights Act signing in 1964
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 Bloody 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, was to be the keynote speaker. He and other speakers were 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.
DEI comes under threat by Trump administration
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.
The Defense Department at one point temporarily removed training videos recognizing the Tuskegee Airmen and an online biography of Jackie Robinson. In February, Trump fired Air Force Gen. CQ Brown Jr., a champion of racial diversity in the military, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Brown, in the wake of Floyd’s killing, had spoken publicly about his experiences as a Black man, and was only the second Black general to serve as chairman.
The administration has fired diversity officers across government, curtailed some agencies’ celebrations of Black History Month and terminated grants and contracts for projects ranging from planting trees in disadvantaged communities to studying achievement gaps in American schools. Trump also wants to force changes at the Smithsonian Institution with an executive order targeting funding for programs that advance “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology.”
Massachusetts also impacted
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 it 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 the 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 put on the rally, said the event was 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.”
