4 April 2018, New York Times, by David Margolick
Fifty years ago tonight, moments before he boarded a plane in Muncie, Ind., Robert Kennedy learned that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been shot in Memphis. Something preternatural in Kennedy told him that Dr. King wouldn’t make it, but only on the other end of the short flight to Indianapolis, where he was scheduled to speak that evening, would he find out he’d been right.
Kennedy headed for the rally, where a crowd awaited him, formulating a eulogy for Dr. King that proved more enduring than anything uttered at his funeral.It proved, in fact, to be Kennedy’s most memorable speech.
He arrived late, by which time things had grown darker, colder, rainier, angrier: many in the crowd, especially more recent arrivals, already knew Dr. King was gone. Some taunted whites there; others, gang members, were bent on violence. “They kill Martin Luther, and we was ready to move,” one later said.
Draped in his brother’s old overcoat, Kennedy climbed the rickety steps leading to the back of a pickup truck that would serve that night as his podium. “This little bitty, small white man started talking, and you could see it was Robert Kennedy,” Darlene Howard, who lived in the neighborhood, later told the filmmaker Donald Boggs. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, they’re going to kill him.’ ” Nearby, one of Kennedy’s advance men, Jerry Bruno, eyed the crowd apprehensively, as well he might: He’d been on duty in Dallas when President Kennedy was killed.
“I have some very sad news for all of you,” Kennedy began, before making his grim announcement. He then described how Dr. King had dedicated his life to love and to justice, and he pleaded for the love and understanding for which Dr. King had always stood. Then he said something startling. “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, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” he said. “I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
Everyone knew that already, of course, but it was something Robert Kennedy had never mentioned publicly before, and it seemed to leach out any remaining venom in the crowd.
Kennedy then cited some lines from Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon.” Words like “pain,” “heart,” “despair,” “awful,” “grace” and “God” resonated in black Indianapolis. “So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love,” he concluded. All told, he spoke that night for around six minutes. But unlike so many other American cities, Indianapolis didn’t burn that night or over the next few days, as did Washington, Chicago, Baltimore and scores of other American cities.
Kennedy’s speech, like Dr. King’s just the night before — where he said, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead” and “But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop” — was overlooked at the time. There was a catastrophe to cover. But one place where it was duly noted was Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis — just outside of which Dr. King had been shot and where his luggage still remained. That was where, only hours after leaving his corpse at the hospital, his disciples gathered to discuss what came next.
They’d hoped to get on television themselves, to plead for the calm that Dr. King himself would have sought, but no one wanted them. But there, on the Philco Starlite television hanging from the wall, was Bobby Kennedy, doing exactly that. “He was in the middle of a totally black community, and he stood there without fear and with great confidence and empathy, and he literally poured his soul out talking about his brother,” Andrew Young later remembered. “The amazing thing to us was that the crowd listened. He reached them.”
The assembled agreed that Dr. King’s torch had now passed to Kennedy; their only question was how long he would get to hold it. “I don’t know, I almost feel like somebody said, ‘He’s probably going to be next,’ ” Young recalled. “I can’t remember that. But that was the feeling that many of us had.”