Fifty years ago today, on April 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, then a candidate for President, rode in silence to a rally in a predominantly black neighborhood in Indianapolis. Kennedy scribbled a few words onto a legal pad, but mostly he just stared out the window. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been killed in Memphis earlier that evening. When Kennedy heard the news, aboard his campaign plane, his head snapped back as if he himself had been struck; then he buried his face in his hands. Later, as his car arrived at the rally, his staff scanned the periphery of the park for snipers.
Looking shaken, Kennedy climbed onto a flatbed truck to address the crowd. Many had not heard the news about King; they had been waiting in the park for hours, holding “Kennedy” signs. He asked them to put the signs down. “I have some very sad news for all of you,” he said. “And I think some sad news for all of our fellow-citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight, in Memphis, Tennessee.”
The crowd convulsed. People fell to their knees and wept. But as Kennedy spoke they became quieter and moved closer to him. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people,” he said, “I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
He went on: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who suffer in our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. . . . Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of his world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”
Kennedy’s speech was itself a prayer, a quiet plea for a shared understanding. Its wellsprings were deep in Kennedy’s own experience, after the murder of his brother, John Kennedy, in 1963; the grief he had carried in the years since; all that he had come to understand about the roots of black unrest, the depths of black frustration with the political process, and the growing focus of black communities on self-determination. In Indianapolis, Kennedy had spoken from the heart, without notes, and expected to leave it at that; he planned to suspend his campaign until after King’s funeral. But John Lewis, among other civil-rights leaders, urged him to keep a scheduled appearance the next day at the City Club of Cleveland, and to use the occasion to make a more pointed case for the principle of nonviolence—against a backdrop of rioting and looting that had broken out that night in nearly every major American city except, it turned out, Indianapolis.
If the Indianapolis speech was a lament, the speech he gave in Cleveland was an indictment—delivered more in sorrow than in anger, but just barely. That morning, April 5th, Kennedy sat down for an interview with Jack Paar, who asked what his reaction had been to King’s assassination. “That more and more people are turning to violence,” Kennedy replied. “And in the last analysis it’s going to destroy our country.” His remarks at the City Club were an elaboration on that theme.
The audience—mostly white, mostly businessmen—sat in silence as Kennedy condemned “the mindless menace of violence . . . which again stains our land and every one of our lives” and asked why America should continue to “make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.” He continued, “Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. . . . Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our society can remove this sickness from our land.” He spoke, too, of “the violence of institutions: indifference and inaction and slow decay.” He saw “no final answers.” Yet, he said, “we know what we must do.”
That exhortation, today, is hard to hear. Two months later, Kennedy, as we know, lost his life to that menace—as had his brother, as had King, and as have many thousands of other “human beings whom other human beings loved needed,” as R.F.K. said in Cleveland. We still know what we must do. Kennedy’s question to us, which hangs in the air half a century later, is when we will finally bring ourselves to do it.
