April 4, 1968

Robert Kennedy was flying into Indianapolis on the evening of April fourth, nineteen sixty-eight, to campaign in the Indiana Democratic primary. His staff learned before the plane landed that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. By the time they reached the airport, King was dead.

Kennedy was scheduled to speak at a rally at Seventeenth and Broadway, in the heart of the Black near-east side. His advisers urged him not to go. The Indianapolis chief of police said he could not guarantee Kennedy's safety. Kennedy went anyway. The crowd that had gathered for a campaign event did not yet know what had happened.

Kennedy stood on a flatbed truck in the cold night air and told them. He was the first to inform most of the people there that King had been killed. People screamed. The crowd surged. Kennedy held up his hands.

What he said next he spoke without notes. He talked about his own brother, killed by an assassin five years earlier. He quoted Aeschylus from memory: "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." He asked the people in front of him not to respond with hatred. He said there was division in the country, hatred, and a desire for revenge. He said he understood the feeling. He said that was not the answer.

That night, cities across the United States erupted. Riots struck Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, and more than one hundred other cities. Indianapolis did not riot. Historians and journalists who have studied that night credit Kennedy's speech, and the relationship of trust he had been building with that community during the primary campaign, with keeping the city quiet.

Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles about two months later. A memorial at Seventeenth and Broadway now marks the site where he stood on the truck.