It started with a blind date.

It was 1952, and young Coretta Scott was in her second semester at the New England Conservatory in Boston. She was devoted to her singing and not particularly looking for romance. Nevertheless, a nudge from a friend had spurred her to give a shot to a young fellow named Martin Luther King Jr. 

It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. “He was too short and he didn’t look that impressive,” she recalls in her memoir, “Coretta: My Love, My Life, My Legacy.” But the substance of the conversation changed her view. “The longer we talked, the taller he grew in stature and the more mature he became in my eyes.”

The couple married a year and four months later. The couple remained devoted to each other, despite reports of his infidelity.

Some 70 years later, a tribute to the couple’s love – for each other and for humanity – was unveiled Friday on Boston Common in the form of a 22-foot-tall bronze sculpture. The Embrace was inspired by a photograph of the famed couple hugging after Martin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unlike most MLK memorials, this newest sculpture honors both Martin and Coretta as pillars of the American civil rights movement. Both Kings “are monumental examples of the capacity of love to shape society,” artist Hank Willis Thomas explained after his design was chosen.

Love was a sustaining current throughout the Kings’ lives and work. It was the most powerful tool the movement had to find justice for Black America. “Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love,” Martin famously told hundreds gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, on the eve of the Montgomery bus boycotts. 

During an early sermon titled “Loving Your Enemies,” he preached that “the way to be integrated with yourself is to be sure that you meet every situation of life with an abounding love.”

Coretta held fast to that ideal. 

When her husband was assassinated, their 12-year-old daughter, Yolanda, asked, “Mommy, should I hate the man who killed my daddy?”

“No, darling,” Coretta told her oldest child. “Your daddy wouldn’t want you to do that.”