Robert F. Kennedy on the Death of Martin Luther King Jr.

Robert Kennedy was campaigning in the Indiana presidential primary when he learned, as his plane landed in Indianapolis on the evening of April 4, 1968, that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. He was scheduled to speak at an outdoor rally in a predominantly Black neighborhood. The police chief warned that he could not guarantee his safety and urged him to cancel. Kennedy went anyway, and learned on the way that King was dead.

Most of the crowd of roughly two thousand had not heard. Standing on the back of a flatbed truck in the cold, wearing his brother's overcoat, Kennedy told them. Then, for the first time in public, he spoke of his own brother's murder. "For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man."

He quoted from memory a passage of Aeschylus he had found in the months of grief after Dallas. "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." He asked the crowd to go home and say a prayer for King's family and for the country, and to dedicate themselves to what the Greeks had written so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Riots broke out in more than a hundred American cities that week. Indianapolis stayed comparatively calm, and many credited the speech. Two months later Kennedy himself was shot in Los Angeles on the night he won the California primary. In 1994 a memorial called the Landmark for Peace was dedicated at the site, with sculptures of Kennedy and King reaching toward each other.