Civil Rights Events

Martin Luther King's Assassination:

RFK's Empathetic Speech, MLK's Funeral

As darkness took hold on April 4, 1968, newly declared presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy stepped in front of a microphone atop a flatbed truck in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Indianapolis.

Looking out onto the crowd, Kennedy turned and quietly asked a city official, “Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

The civil rights leader had been shot a few hours earlier, though the news that he was dead hadn’t reached everyone yet.

“We’ve left it up to you,” the official said (Rosenwald 1).

The news of April 4, 1968, was like a body blow to Senator Robert Kennedy. He “seemed to shrink back,” said John J. Lindsay, a Newsweek reporter traveling with the Democratic presidential candidate. For Kennedy, King’s slaying served as an intersection between past and future. It kindled memories of one of the worst days of his life, November 22, 1963, when J. Edgar Hoover coldly told him that his brother, President John F. Kennedy, had been shot and killed in Dallas. Furthermore, it shook Kennedy’s belief in what lay ahead. He sometimes received death threats and lived in anticipation of gunshots.

…

Climbing onto a flatbed truck and wearing his slain brother’s overcoat, Kennedy looked at the crowd. Through the cold, smoky air, he saw faces upturned optimistically and knew they soon would be frozen in horror.

At first, he struggled to gain his rhetorical feet. Then, one of the most eloquent extemporaneous speeches of the 20th century tumbled from his lips. During the heartfelt speech, Kennedy shared feelings about his brother’s assassination—something he had avoided expressing, even to his staff. The pain was too great.

Clutching scribbled notes made in his car, RFK began simply: “I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.” Gasps and shrieks met his words. “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in” (George 1-2).

Kennedy … quoted the Greek playwright Aeschylus — “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart …” — and to the astonishment of his aides, the audience and even his own family, the senator referenced his brother’s murder for the first time.

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill 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,” Kennedy said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

That night, amid one of the most chaotic years in American history, the country burned. Riots broke out in more than 100 cities, including Washington, where at least a dozen people died.

“I was upset, to put it mildly,” said Abie Washington, then 26 and just out of the Navy, who stood that evening in the crowd listening to Kennedy. “I was pissed. Something needed to be done and I wanted to do it.”

But as Kennedy kept speaking, something came over him.

“My level of emotion went from one extreme to another,” Washington said. “He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?”

There was no rioting in Indianapolis.

They pleaded with Kennedy not to go — campaign aides, the police chief, his wife Ethel.

It was too dangerous, they said. Residents near the rally site had seen angry men carrying weapons and cans of gas.

“The black people in this neighborhood,” one resident told historian Thurston Clarke, “were going to burn the city down.”

…

… Kennedy had come to greatly respect King, his campaign echoing the concerns of the civil rights leader for the poor and disenfranchised.

Kennedy learned that King had been shot as he boarded a plane for Indianapolis. When it landed, a reporter told Kennedy that King was dead.

“Kennedy’s face went blank and he jerked his head backward, as if the bullet struck him, too,” Clarke wrote in “The Last Campaign,” an account of Kennedy’s 82-day run for president. “Then he covered his face with his hands and murmured, ‘Oh God, when is this violence going to stop?’”

One of Kennedy’s campaign staffers was John Lewis, who had already risked his life to defy segregation alongside King and would later become a congressman from Georgia. Lewis urged Kennedy not to cancel the speech.

“I thought Bobby Kennedy coming would have a cooling impact on the audience,” Lewis said in an interview. “He appealed to the hearts and the minds and souls of the people there — black and white.”

On the car ride over, Kennedy was nearly silent, staring out the window and undoubtedly, his aides said later, thinking about his brother.

Arriving at the park, he was greeted with jeers.

“What are you doing here, whitey?” someone shouted.

And then Kennedy began speaking.

…

King’s death, Kennedy said, left the black community with a choice about how to respond, whether to seek revenge.

“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,” Kennedy 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.”

“What we need in the United States,” he continued, “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.”

A sense of grace washed over the crowd.

Two Purdue University speech professors later interviewed audience members and published a paper examining the shift in the crowd. One man told the professors that Kennedy had “tears in his eyes, I saw it, he felt it man, he cried.”

But how, the professors asked, could they relate to a white rich man?

“We black people remember his brother,” one person interviewed said. “We know what trouble is, we had all kinds of it.”

Another man said, “The cat tell the truth like it is.”

The threat of violence subsided. Everyone went home (Rosenwald 1-5).

When Kennedy reached his hotel, he called King’s widow Coretta Scott King in Atlanta. She said she needed a plane to carry her husband’s body from Memphis to Atlanta, and he immediately promised to provide her one.

As the night proceeded, a restive Kennedy visited several campaign staffers. When he talked to speechwriters Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield, he made a rare reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, saying JFK’s assassin had unleashed a flood of violence. He reportedly told “Kennedy for California” organizer Joan Braden, “it could have been me.”

The next day, he prepared for an appearance in Cleveland, while his staff worried about his safety. When a possible gunman was reported atop a nearby building, an aide closed the blinds, but Kennedy ordered them opened. “If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot,” he said. Speaking in Cleveland, he asked, “What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by his assassin’s bullet.”

Meanwhile, African-American anger erupted in rioting across more than 100 American cities, with deaths totaling 39 and injuries 2,500. After the senator finished his campaign swing, he returned to Washington. From the air, he could see smoke hovering over city neighborhoods. Ignoring his staff’s pleas, he visited riot-ravaged streets. At home, he watched riot footage on TV alongside his 8-year-old daughter, Kerry, and told her that he understood African-American frustration, but the rioters were “bad” (George 2).

President Johnson designated Sunday, April 7, as a national day of mourning.

On April 8, the [Memphis] march that King promised to lead commenced as scheduled. But it was Coretta Scott King at the head of it, as a tribute to her husband (Suggs 16).

On April 9, she was back in Atlanta for her husband’s funeral.

"We did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to keep things calm," Eldrin Bell, a police detective at the time, told Atlanta magazine in 2008. "We were walking up and down the streets all hours of the day to [prevent] riots."

King's funeral was held on April 9, 1968, five days after his death. Until then, the reverend was laid in state at the Sisters Chapel at Spelman College in Atlanta. Tens of thousands of mourners streamed into the chapel to pay their respects. Meanwhile, even more people poured into Atlanta. The small city was overwhelmed. The transit system provided free rides from the airport and train stations to downtown to keep things moving. When the hotels ran out of space for visitors, colleges, churches, and private homes opened their doors. When local radio stations put out a call for help or food, people eagerly answered. "It was a marvelous thing, everyone coming together," civil rights leader Xernona Clayton told Atlanta magazine. "I don't think anybody paid for food in this city for two or three days."

The day of the funeral, the front of City Hall was draped in black and city schools were closed so kids could attend the service. But there was tension in the air, too. Gov. Lester Maddox had barricaded himself inside the State Capital, not far from City Hall. Maddox surrounded his building with state troopers and reportedly ordered them to "shoot them down and stack them up," if needed. But there wasn't any need. The city, its leaders, the police, and the people were cooperative and respectful for King.

A packed private service was held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King and his father had served as pastors. King's longtime friend Rev. Ralph Abernathy began the service, calling the event "one of the darkest hours of mankind." At the request of Coretta Scott King, the last sermon King gave, a prescient reflection on his own funeral, was played on a tape recorder.

"Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice," King said. "Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness."

King's coffin was transferred to a wooden mule-drawn wagon, which called to mind royal funerals with their horse-drawn coaches. But King's version was chosen specifically for being so worn down and rugged — representative of the grounded work and people King lived and died for. The wagon, followed by King's family, friends, and fellow civil rights leaders, walked the four-mile route from the church to the campus of Morehouse College, King's alma mater. An estimated 150,000 people fanned out behind them in a solemn processional. Thousands more lined the streets to watch the coffin pass. Though the crowd occasionally broke out into song, the afternoon was remarkably quiet and peaceful, with just the sound of feet on pavement filling the air (Hansen 1-3).

Jacqueline [, Ethel] and Bobby Kennedy were there, as were a host of other celebs and major political figures. The Kennedys met privately with Coretta, she and Ethel upon meeting hugging.

Morehouse President Benjamin Mays, King’s great mentor, gave the eulogy.

“He was not ahead of his time. No man is ahead of his time. Every man is within his star, each in his time. Each man must respond to the call of God in his lifetime and not in somebody else’s time,” Mays said. “If physical death was the price he had to pay to rid America of prejudice and injustice, nothing could be more redemptive” (Suggs 16).

The youngest of Coretta and Martin Luther King Jr.’s four children, Bernice [King] had just turned five-years-old two weeks earlier.

But there she was, in a packed Ebenezer Baptist Church, dressed in a white dress and draped across her mother’s knees.

Her mother wore a black dress and mourning veil. Her father was in a casket fewer than five feet away.

Bernice King’s eyes seemed distant, not noticing or caring that photographer Moneta Sleet Jr. was capturing her most vulnerable moment.

Maybe she was thinking about the times she would jump off the refrigerator into her father’s arms, terrifying her mother.

Or maybe she was thinking about how her father would pick up green onions at the dinner table and chew them like celery.

Maybe she was thinking about the kissing game, where she and each of her siblings were assigned a spot to kiss their father when he came home.

Bernice’s spot was her father’s forehead.

“That was my bonding and identification with him,” Bernice King would say later. “I thought it was so important because without that, I literally would have no memories of my father. But I remember that like it was yesterday.”(Suggs “Bernice” 1-2).

By May 1968, the remaining members of the SCLC embarked on the Poor People’s Campaign and erected Resurrection City in Washington. Hundreds camped out and tried to meet with congress for several weeks. But without King, it barely made a dent.

“If Martin Luther King had lived and been able to implement and carry out that unbelievable effort, bringing hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to Washington D.C, it would have had a profound impact on the American community,” said U.S. Rep. John Lewis. “[It would have had a profound impact] on the powers that be, on the members of congress, on the President of the United States, to do something about poverty. About hunger” (Suggs 16).

Works cited:

George, Alice. “When Robert Kennedy Delivered the News of Martin Luther King’s Assassination.” Smithsonian. April 2, 2018. Web. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/emotionally-wounded-robert-kennedy-delivers-news-kings-assassination-180968625/

Hansen, Lauren. “Keeping the Peace for Martin Luther King, Jr.” The Week. Web. https://theweek.com/captured/673288/keeping-peace-martin-luther-king-jr

Rosenwald, Michael S. “‘That Stain of Bloodshed’: After King’s Assassination, RFK Calmed an Angry Crowd with an Unforgettable Speech.” The Washington Post. April 4, 2018. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/03/that-stain-of-bloodshed-after-kings-assassination-rfk-calmed-an-angry-crowd-with-an-unforgettable-speech/?noredirect=on

Suggs, Ernie. “Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Web. http://honoringmlk.com/

Suggs, Ernie. “Martin Luther King Jr.'s Funeral Was Turning Point for Young Bernice King.” AJC: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. March 31, 2018. Web. https://www.ajc.com/news/martin-luther-king-funeral-was-turning-point-for-young-bernice-king/IRGesUpbiHMmD3ymIT5mbK/