Robert F. Kennedy: Remarks on the Death of Martin Luther King

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Kennedy announced that he was running for president on March 16, 1968. That decision had been a long time in coming. He had weighed the advantages and disadvantages of running against an incumbent president from within his own party as well as the changing political circumstances of 1967 and 1968. The Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy showed no such hesitation, and his surprisingly strong performance in the New Hampshire primary suggested that Lyndon Johnson was politically vulnerable. That circumstance was due in large part to public perception of the situation in Vietnam following the Tet Offensive, in which the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched a series of attacks that convinced many Americans that victory was as far off as ever, if obtainable at all.

Only two weeks after Kennedy's announcement, on March 31, 1968, Johnson withdrew from the presidential race. Four days later, fresh from a meeting with the president, Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana. As he left Muncie on a short flight to Indianapolis, he learned that the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee; when the plane landed, he learned that King was dead. Setting aside warnings that he might be putting his life at risk, Kennedy decided to keep his commitment to appear at a rally at an African American community center. When he arrived, he saw at once that few people in the crowd of thousands were aware of King's assassination. Ignoring the rain drizzling down as darkness approached, Kennedy mounted the platform, asked the crowd to put down their signs, and then relayed the “sad news” of King's death. From the crowd there were anguished cries.

Reminding the crowd that King had “dedicated his life to love and to justice” for all, Kennedy tells those gathered before him that “it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.” He understood that blacks might well be angry at what had happened and might even want revenge—but those sentiments would lead the nation toward “greater polarization,” with whites and blacks battling, “filled with hatred toward one another.” Americans could also, to the contrary, choose to learn from what had happened “and replace that violence … with an effort to understand, compassion and love.” As the brother of a victim of an assassin's bullet, he reminds his listeners that he knows how some people feel; at this point in time, however, it is more important for American to move beyond division and hatred toward “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.” Over the next several days, riots broke out in many American cities, as people responded with anger to King's death. But all remained quiet in Indianapolis.