I think my father and mother would challenge us to be a better America because we can become that. It starts with something called love.”

Arielle Gray's grandfather — then a teenager — joined the march to the Common led by King drawing attention to the racial imbalances in Boston.

On a rainy day in late April 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the Boston Common bandstand and addressed a crowd of 20,000 people who had marched with him from Roxbury. Sixty years later — on a similarly rainy day — thousands gathered at Trinity Church in the Back Bay and marched to Boston Common in commemoration of that monumental event.