Larry Tye is the author of seven books, including the just-released Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, from which this article is adapted.

The best clue to where the participants at the historic gathering stood was where they sat. All 11 African-Americans lined up on one side of the Kennedy family drawing room overlooking Central Park, the five whites on the other. It was Harlem vs. Hickory Hill. The partition was a fitting one for the spring of 1963, when demarcation of the races was written into law across the American South and into practice in the rest of the land. But it was not an auspicious beginning to an urgent conclave that the black novelist James Baldwin had pulled together, at the request of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to talk about why a volcano of rage was building up in Northern ghettos and why mainstream civil rights leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t quell it as summer approached.

A second sign that the meeting was ill-fated was not who had been invited but who had not. Baldwin assembled a motley collection of fellow artists, academics, and second-tier civil rights leaders, along with his lawyer, secretary, literary agent, brother, and brother’s girlfriend. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t welcome, nor were the top people from the NAACP and the Urban League, because Bobby Kennedy wanted a no-holds-barred critique of their leadership. He also hoped for a sober discussion of what the Kennedy administration should do, with African-Americans who knew what it already was doing. Having a serious conversation without the serious players would have been difficult enough, but Bobby made it even harder: What he really wanted was gratitude, not candor. Baldwin did his best given those constraints and only on one day’s notice. Bobby may not have been inclined to take them seriously, yet everyone participating—whether a matinee idol or crooner, dramatist or therapist—had earned their stripes as activists.


After feeding his guests a light buffet and settling them in chairs or on footstools, Bobby opened the discussion on tame and self-serving notes. He listed all that he and his brother John F. Kennedy had accomplished in advancing African-American rights, explaining why their efforts were groundbreaking. He warned that the politics of race could get dicey with voters going to the polls in just 18 months and conservative white Democrats threatening to bolt. “We have a party in revolt and we have to be somewhat considerate about how to keep them on board if the Democratic Party is going to prevail in the next elections,” said the attorney general. He had already implied that he was among friends by tossing his jacket onto the back of his chair, rolling up his shirtsleeves and welcoming everyone into his father’s elegant apartment. Now he wanted these friends to explain why so many of their African-American brethren were being drawn to dangerous radicals like Malcolm X and his Black Muslims.

New Window OPTICS: Robert F. Kennedy's Education on Race: Images from a civil rights figure's steep learning curve (click to view gallery) | Getty

The first reaction to Bobby’s speech was halfhearted and short-lived. Bobby assumed his audience was naive about the real world of raw-boned politics, while they took him to be unschooled in the even rawer realities of the slums. “He had called the meeting in hopes of persuading us that he and his brother were doing all that could be done,” remembered the singer Lena Horne, whose silken voice had earned her center stage at the Cotton Club and whose left-leaning politics had gotten her blacklisted in Hollywood. “The funny thing was that no one there disputed that. It was just that it did not seem enough. … He said something about his family and the kinds of discrimination it had had to fight. He also said he thought a Negro would be president within 40 years. He seemed to feel that this would establish some sort of identification, some sort of rapport, between us. It did not. … The emotions of Negroes are running so differently from those of white men these days that the comparison between a white man’s experience and a Negro’s just doesn’t work.”

Kenneth Clark, black America’s preeminent psychologist, came prepared to lay out studies and statistics to document that corrosive racial divide, but he never got the chance. Jerome Smith, a young activist who had held back as long as he could, suddenly shattered the calm, his stammer underlining his anger. “Mr. Kennedy, I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you and your brother,” he began. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail party patter.” The real threat to white America wasn’t the Black Muslims, Smith insisted, it was when nonviolence advocates like him lost hope. The 24-year-old’s record made his words resonate. He had suffered as many savage beatings as any civil rights protester of the era, including one for which he was getting medical care in New York. But his patience and his pacifism were wearing thin, he warned his rapt audience. If the police came at him with more guns, dogs and hoses, he would answer with a weapon of his own. “When I pull a trigger,” he said, “kiss it goodbye.”

Bobby was shocked, but Smith wasn’t through. Not only would young blacks like him fight to protect their rights at home, he said, but they would refuse to fight for America in Cuba, Vietnam or any of the other places the Kennedys saw threats. “Never! Never! Never!” This was unfathomable to Bobby. “You will not fight for your country?” asked the attorney general, who had lost one brother and nearly a second at war. “How can you say that?” Rather than backing down, Smith said just being in the room with Bobby “makes me nauseous.” Others chimed in, demanding to know why the government couldn’t get tougher in taking on racist laws and ghetto blight. Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote the play A Raisin in the Sun, stood to say she was sickened as well. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” she said, pointing to Smith.

Musician and actor Harry Belafonte, Freedom Rider Diane Nash and Freedom Rider Charles Jones discussing the Freedom Riders movement on July 14, 1961. Bobby Kennedy considered Belafonte a loyal friend. | Getty

Three hours into the evening the dialogue had become a brawl, with the tone set by Smith. “He didn’t sing or dance or act. Yet he became the focal point,” Baldwin said. “That boy, after all, in some sense, represented to everybody in that room our hope. Our honor. Our dignity. But, above all, our hope.” Bobby had heard enough. His tone let everyone know the welcome mat had been taken up. His flushed face showed how incensed he was. As his guests were leaving he was approached by Harry Belafonte, the King of Calypso, whom he had considered a loyal friend. “I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you say something?’” Bobby recounted later. “He said, ‘If I said something, it would affect my position with these people, and I have a chance to influence them. … If I sided with you on these matters, then I would become suspect.” Before Belafonte could finish his thought, Bobby turned away, grumbling, “Enough.”

That set-to of half a century ago is eerily reminiscent of today’s America in which Republicans like Donald Trump are fueling rather than quelling the rage building in places like Dallas, Baton Rouge and the suburbs of St. Paul, national Democrats are only slightly less tone deaf as they try to please black supporters without alienating white ones, and African-Americans are despairing whether anyone in the political establishment is capable of bridging the racial divide. Yet, if Bobby Kennedy’s story is partly a sign of how little things have changed, it also offers inspiration. He may have been clueless about race relations when he took over as his brother’s attorney general, and when he spoke to that group at his father’s apartment in 1963, but he was the quickest of learners. He suffered through and grew from the Freedom Rides, when he was called on to protect the young protesters trying to integrate buses traveling across the Deep South, and even more from the race riots at Ole Miss and the University of Alabama, when he was trying to ensure that black students could tap their right to enroll guaranteed by the Supreme Court but denied by Mississippi and Alabama. In both cases, Bobby came to see that appeasing arch-segregationists by delaying the use of federal force only emboldened the racists. He already knew that bigotry wasn’t confined to the South, but he now acknowledged that not just America’s laws but its soul needed redemption. He stood up against racist leaders on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, crusaded against joblessness and hunger, and used his seat in the U.S. Senate to pioneer anti-poverty programs from the Mississippi Delta to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, America’s biggest ghetto. By the time of his death in June 1968, Bobby was the most trusted white man in black America.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and others greet Freedom Riders about to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in May 1961. The Freedom Riders rode buses throughout the southern United States in the months following the Boynton v. Virginia Supreme Court case, which essentially outlawed racial segregation on public transportation, in order to test and call attention to still existing local policies that ran contrary to national laws. | Getty

Just how far he had come was apparent the night, five years after the Baldwin powwow, on April 4, 1968, when King was gunned down outside his room at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel. Bobby was in Indiana for the first of the big primary tests in his improbable campaign for president. He got word of the shooting as he was boarding a plane from Muncie to Indianapolis; by the time he landed, King was dead. An outdoor rally had been planned for the heart of Indianapolis’ ghetto at 17th and Broadway, but the mayor and chief of police told Bobby not to go, fearing for his safety and their city’s. (The assistant chief of police, who was black, had a different message for Kennedy advance men: Bobby was so well-liked in the ghetto that he “could sleep all night in the middle of 17th and Broadway and not be hurt.”) Bobby wouldn’t hear of canceling —“I’m going to go there,” he said, “and that’s it”—continuing on to the black neighborhood and asking his police escort to peel off just before he arrived. When an aide handed him scribbled notes he stuffed them into his pocket, preferring to extemporize but unsure what the nearly all-black crowd of a thousand knew about King’s condition and what it would be open to hearing from a white politician.

“I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some—some very sad news for all of you. … Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight,” he said from the flatbed truck that served as his platform, his dark overcoat pulled tight against the raw cold as his audience gasped as one: “No! No!” He continued, louder but his voice still tremulous, “For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also 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. … 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 still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King—yeah, it’s true—but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”

His remarks, lasting barely five minutes, were pitch perfect. No one else had Bobby’s credibility in talking about the pain of a loved one gunned down, or about racial reconciliation. It was the first time he had opened up that way about his brother Jack and his listeners sensed it, wanting to comfort him even as he tried to soothe them. “To do it that night was an incredibly powerful and connective and emotionally honest gesture,” said John Lewis, a Freedom Rider who knew the strains in Bobby’s relationship with King and had taken heat for joining the Kennedy campaign. But Lewis also saw that Bobby’s unorthodox bid for the White House was setting a standard for racial and ethnic bridge-building that resonates more than ever in today’s climate of divisiveness, and summons us to do better. “I said to some of my friends, ‘Dr. King may be gone but we still have Robert Kennedy,”’ recalls Lewis, now a congressman. Not only did Bobby prove wrong that night the mayor and police chief, but the crowd—some carrying knives and homemade bombs—dispersed as he’d asked. Indianapolis would be hailed as an island of calm during that Holy Week Uprising that saw riots break out in more than 100 U.S. cities. The way Kennedy held his audience spellbound would have been unimaginable for his more wooden political rivals—President Lyndon Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, or Senator Eugene McCarthy. If the King murder and its aftermath put urban unrest back on the front burner of the 1968 campaign, it also reinforced that Bobby was the one Caucasian in America trusted by African-Americans. As the signs in the ghetto throughout the campaign said "Kennedy white but alright."

Back at his hotel, Bobby couldn’t unwind. Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar, who had been waiting to make sure the presidential candidate made it out of the ghetto, recalls him as “shaken.” Lewis said Bobby “broke down on a bed, lay there on his stomach and cried.” This Kennedy brother also knew from experience just what King’s widow, Coretta, would need, and he arranged for a plane to bring her to Memphis to pick up her husband’s body, then for three more telephones to be installed at her home that very night. He’d already canceled all campaign appearances except one the next day at the Cleveland City Club, which would be a plea for national calm. He’d met with a dozen local black leaders, with Charles Hendricks of the Radical Action Program conceding afterward that the senator was “completely sympathetic and understanding,” and Bill Bell, who ran a youth center, adding that “the cat [Kennedy] was able to relax.” Then Bobby prowled the hotel, checking in on aides who years later would recall his stream-of-consciousness remarks that offered a lens into a soul troubled by the nation’s problems and his own. “You know,” he said to one of them, “that fellow Harvey Lee Oswald, whatever his name is, set something loose in this country.” He told another, “My God. It might have been me.” The observation that stuck longest with those who heard it was, “You know, the death of Martin Luther King isn’t the worst thing that ever happened in the world.” Speechwriter Jeff Greenfield said, “I could not for the life of me understand that callousness until, of course, I realized he had been thinking of the death of his brother.”

Over the next week Bobby made clear how, for the rest of his campaign and his life, he would be the racial healer that Lyndon Johnson wanted to be but couldn’t, despite authoring a record number of civil rights laws. More than any of King’s would-be successors, Kennedy inherited the slain leader’s mantles of prophecy and advocacy. “Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear,” Bobby told his mostly white and wealthy listeners in Cleveland. “Only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.” Two days later he was back in Washington, where troops in armored carriers patrolled the riot-ravaged streets that he insisted on walking. “A crowd gathered behind us, following Bobby Kennedy. The troops saw us coming at a distance, and they put on their gas masks and got the guns at ready,” recalled Walter Fauntroy, a minister, city councilor, and later the District’s delegate to the U.S. Congress. “When they saw it was Bobby Kennedy, they took off their masks and let us through. They looked awfully relieved.”

Ethel Kennedy shakes hands with Martin Luther King III after she and her husband Robert F. Kennedy, center, visited his mother Coretta Scott King at her Atlanta home on April 8, 1968. | AP Photo

He was the unexpected center of attention again at King’s funeral in Atlanta on April 9, to the dismay of McCarthy, Humphrey, former Vice President Richard Nixon, and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who were largely ignored, and LBJ, who didn’t come. Andrew Young, one of King’s closest aides, who would later serve as Atlanta’s mayor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was a Kennedy skeptic until that day when Bobby met with him and other black leaders. “He said, ‘You have to pick up the torch or the cross of the fallen hero and carry it on. There’s no slowing down, there’s no stopping,’” Young remembers 50 years later. “From that point on, I felt that this was a guy that I could give my life for, like I would have for Martin. I never felt that way about Gene McCarthy or [George] McGovern or anybody else.” To the Reverend Frederick D. Kirkpatrick, another civil rights icon, Bobby was the “blue-eyed soul brother.”

King himself had recognized that potential sooner than most, and patiently endured the slow way in which Bobby’s growth was stoked by the furnace of experience. No matter that Bobby was neither as patient nor as trusting with King, and had never even sat down with him one-on-one. And no, it wasn’t what today’s cynical pundits would dismiss as mere flip-flopping. “Somewhere in this man sits good,” the preacher and civil rights pioneer had told his lieutenants early on. “Our task is to find his moral center and win him to our cause."