Kick Kennedy is a writer at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

On this day in 1968, my grandfather, Robert F. Kennedy, shared the tragic news of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death with a crowd in downtown Indianapolis. It was the era before instant information. Most of the crowd had not heard the news. Some had. And some of these arrived with clubs and chains, preparing to riot. Mayor Richard Lugar had warned Kennedy not to speak. The local Indianapolis police refused to escort him into the ghetto. It was too dangerous, they told him. But after consulting civil rights leader John Lewis, who had organized the rally, Robert Kennedy went unguarded to address the crowd.

Thirty-four cities rioted that night. Indianapolis was the only American city with a large black population that did not. I think that outcome—which observers at the time attributed at least in part to RFK’s calming presence and above all his message—still has a great deal of relevance for where our country is today, 48 years later.


Standing on a podium mounted on a flatbed truck, RFK began by announcing the bad news that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed. The crowd gasped audibly, but he quickly silenced them by posing a kind of moral challenge. He acknowledged that they might “be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge,” but he invoked the example of Dr. King, and he turned the crowd’s choice whether to erupt or not into a choice for the nation as well. “We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another,” he said. “Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love.”

And then Robert Kennedy spoke for the first time publicly about his own pain over the assassination of his brother, John F. Kennedy. “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,” he said.

While sharing the memory of his own agonizing tragedy, RFK also hinted at how he had gotten through it and transcended his own anger and pain, appealing to the crowd’s idealism by invoking words written by a Greek poet who had been dead 2,500 years, but who had lived in the world’s first democracy. “My favorite poem, my—my favorite poet was by Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

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.”

Finally RFK called for a kind of national transcendence of racial, ethnic and generational mistrust, in words that were directed at the times he lived in—the civil rights battles and Vietnam protests of that era—but which also seem to hit us where we live today. “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,” he said.

“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.”

Robert Kennedy accomplished an extraordinary feat in his last campaign by uniting blacks and working whites in a way that no American politician has since been able to replicate. He was assassinated himself two months later.

Following his death, many of those working class white RFK supporters migrated to Richard Nixon’s campaign, attracted by the so called “Southern Strategy.” Nixon and his advisers devised this approach to woo working class whites who experienced civil rights advances by blacks as a social demotion. For 45 years the GOP leaders have consolidated their support through dog whistle code signals. The current campaign is shocking not for its racism, xenophobia and misogyny, but because—for the first time since George Wallace ran against RFK in 1968—those signals to our darkest angels are no longer being encrypted.

It’s time to remind ourselves that the America that RFK and MLK fought for and believe in is a lot better than that.