Leadership
Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2025 11:37 pm
The day that Martin Luther King, Jr. died, candidate Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to speak at the opening of a campaign office in Indianapolis. He tossed aside his planned stump speech and addressed a crowd from the back of a flatbed truck. He first announced that MLK had died and then spoke to the crowd.
This is what leadership looks like in the face of tragedy.Facing the now stunned and disbelieving audience, some of whom were weeping at their loss, Kennedy gave an impassioned approximately six-minute speech on the need for compassion in the face of violence that has gone down in history as one of the great extemporaneous political speeches in the modern era. A New York journalist close to Kennedy observed that the candidate “gave a talk that all his skilled speechwriters working together could not have surpassed.” John Lewis, a seasoned veteran of the civil rights movement who helped organize the rally, and today a congressman from Georgia, recalled that when Kennedy spoke the crowd hung on his every word. “It didn’t matter that he was white or rich or a Kennedy,” said Lewis. “At this moment he was just a human being, just like all of us, and he spoke that way.”
To help try and explain the tragedy, Kennedy recalled the words of Aeschylus, whose words from Agamemnon had comforted him following the assassination of his brother: “He [Aeschylus] 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.’” Kennedy went on to attempt to calm the crowd’s growing anger about King’s killing with these words:“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 or lawlessness; but 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 they be black. . . .“We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder. . . .“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
”The news of King’s violent death at the hands of a white gunman had sparked outrage and violence across the country. Riots exploded in several cities, including the nation’s capital, Washington, DC. Regular army troops were called into action by President Johnson to bring the situation under control. But in Indianapolis, the crowd at Seventeenth and Broadway had taken Kennedy’s words to heart and had quietly left the rally and returned home. “We walked away in pain but not with a sense of revenge,” said Crawford.
Both whites and blacks who witnessed the Indianapolis speech described what they experienced in religious terms. Evans, the young high school student, said she has long held an “emotional memory” of Kennedy’s remarks and remembered feeling as if the candidate had “laid his hands upon the audience” and healed them, deflating the powerful anger that surged through the packed audience. “It was worth the wait,” she said.Robinson believed that Kennedy’s speech and temperament changed the minds of those who were angry about King’s death. “I was thinking revenge right away,” Robinson remembered. “But then the words [Kennedy] used and his calmness made me understand the right response in the face of Dr. King’s assassination. His [Kennedy’s] speech made me reflect on what Dr. King stood for and that was peace and getting together and creating change. It made me realize one person could make a difference.”