Trump's attack on diversity takes center stage as Boston remembers 1965
Freedom Rally led by MLK
[April 26, 2025]
By MICHAEL CASEY
BOSTON (AP) — 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 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,” said Lucas, a social
activist and retired postal worker who was standing on the Boston Common
near the site of 20-foot-high (6-meter) 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
(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 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.
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.
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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. (AP Photo, file)
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 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.”
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