A 40-Year Memory- Dr. King and Bobby

The world was truly changing. LBJ had announced four days earlier that he wasn't going to run again.

Hooray!

Things were looking good. Bobby Kennedy was in the race.

Good news.

There was still hope in the world. The United States is the shining example of how democracy works. We were more convinced of it than ever.

Even if I did have to study. Well, at least act like I was studying. I was at the end of my sophomore year in college and much more interested in the band and the radio station than the engineering classes I was not cut out to do in the first place. I had been studying at the student union and, coincidentally, walking downstairs to see what was going on at the radio station where I was a newsman and disc jockey.

The memory is only vague; the specifics not real clear. I remember the bell going off on the teletype machine which is how we got all the news. I poked my head in the newsroom (a room about the size of a closet) and looked to see what the news was. I didn't save that piece of paper. I wish now I had. Or maybe my memory is false and someone else told me what was on the paper. I do remember going into the DJ on the air and asking him to interrupt the show for a news bulletin.

Martin Luther King was shot tonight in Memphis.

No. It cannot be.

Studying was over for that night. How can one study when the world is crazy. I walked back to the dorm in shock and angry. I didn't know at the time that this would be the first of many such moments in that long ago year that split the world apart. When I got back to the dorm it was even worse. No one was reacting. They were all going about their business as if nothing had happened. Oh a few were watching the news on TV in that pre-24/7 era. That only made me more angry.

Martin Luther King was gone. Killed. Murdered. My God, don't you have any feelings?

I'm a white guy and I was angry. What's it going to be like among the Black Americans. Things had already been difficult in a number of cities. Riots and death and destruction were not new. What now?

Well as we all know rioting broke out around the country. With one major exception. Indianapolis, Indiana.

Bobby Kennedy was the reason. He was scheduled to make a campaign appearance there that night.

Instead he canceled the appearance and made an impromptu appearance in the Black neighborhood and delivered what may have been his greatest speech. Here's part of it...

For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

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.

A few weeks ago Barack Obama, in Indianapolis referred to this speech as a call to move beyond racial issues. It reminded me that even now, 40 years later, we are still trying to move beyond those same issues. Bobby Kennedy's words- and presence- probably kept Indianapolis from going the way of hundreds of other cities.

Syl Jones in today's Star-Tribune wrote:

The looting, the armed occupations, the ugliness of the act of murdering an apostle of nonviolence all took their toll on us. Hope became like the pool of blood dripping from the balcony outside the Lorraine Motel, slowly going down the drain. The dream was over. The nightmare was just beginning...The narrative of this country changed forever in 1968. We lost our innocence as children and as a nation, and once lost, a fragile thing like innocence can never be restored.
--Star-Tribune

I hope, though, that in the loss of innocence, which I, too, am painfully aware of- and trying to sort out in this series of 40-Year Memories- we don't also lose our direction. Maybe we have over the last 40 years. Maybe, as my friend G commented, it was taken from us. But that doesn't mean we can't get it back. It doesn't mean that we can't continue to be seekers - pilgrims- aware of our losses and shortcomings but also aware that people like Dr. King saw something better and greater from his moutain top.

Today as we remember that awful Thursday may we also remember his vision of what this country is supposed to be about. And remember that there have been many times when we have lived up to it. It is not too late, even now.

Bobby Kennedy's whole speech

Listen to the speech here.
Or watch part of it here.