People pose at the Martin Luther King Jr memorial statue The Embrace on Martin Luther King Jr Day on the Boston Common in Boston. Last modified on Thu 19 Jan 2023 17. 22ft-tall, 19-ton bronze sculpture unveiled last Friday in Boston roll, The Embrace, depicts two pairs of arms wrapped in a hug: those of Martin Luther King Jr and his wife, Coretta Scott King.

The significance wasn’t lost on guests at the unveiling, who included participants in the civil rights movement, some nearly 100 years old. Many onlookers were in tears, organizers say. Yet some online viewers of the sculpture had a different reaction: photographs taken from certain angles made one of the civil rights leaders’ arms look like a penis, they said. The comedian Leslie Jones joked that the sculpture looked like the late civil rights leader performing a sex act on his wife. If this was just about an optical illusion, the story might have ended there.

But the conflict almost immediately took a political turn after the sculpture was blasted by an unexpected source: the Oakland activist Seneca Scott, a former Bay Area labor organizer and a cousin of Coretta Scott King. Singer Pierre Fontaine spontaneously sings We Shall Overcome for the crowd gathered to view The Embrace on Martin Luther King Jr Day. EPAThe broadside earned him a headline in the conservative New York Post, and a three-minute live interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who broke into a grin as Scott accused the sculpture of wasting public funds and mocking people struggling to afford groceries. It’s not art, it’s a middle finger. Just days into its public life, The Embrace was becoming a kind of political litmus test.

But what do its creators think? Thomas was speaking to me on a Zoom call alongside other non-profit workers of color who helped realize the project. The mood was subdued, even a little tense. I don’t feel like it other than sending Seneca love and gratitude for highlighting The Embrace. Sculptor Hank Willis Thomas poses under the Martin Luther King Jr memorial statue. EPAThomas explained he had originally trained as a photographer, which sparked a fascination with the context behind famous civil rights photographs: what was included in the frame and what was left out?