On June 5, much of the media covered the 55th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination for president when he was killed. If you were around then, it was the latest bad news in a decade of bad news.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Malcolm X was gunned down in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis just two months before Sen. Kennedy was killed while leaving his California primary election victory celebration.
After the King assassination, protesters set cities and neighborhoods on fire. Many cities enforced curfews and banned the sale of gasoline in cans. And the National Guard patrolled the streets where rioting was the worst, bivouacking in town squares and stadiums.
The war in Vietnam became so unpopular late in the decade that millions of Americans took to the streets in protest, sometimes battling supporters of the war or the police. And peaceful Black protesters, seeking the right to vote, were savagely beaten while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., run to ground by troopers on horseback.
All of this — the killings and beatings and rioting and conflagration and troops in the streets — was seen on televisions in the living rooms of American families, convincing many of them that the American experiment was in danger of failing.
But there was something about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that gave many Americans a shock. Disparate groups of Americans realized that they had something in common, a sense that unity had been possible. His death deepened that sense, and the crowds that came out to greet the funeral train that carried Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington, D.C., gave life to this realization.
Historian Steven M. Gillon saw the train as a boy when it passed through his small town. He was one of more than a million mourners who lined the tracks for a final farewell. Writing for the History Channel last week, Gillon says, “RFK was the only white politician in America who could walk through the streets of both white and Black working-class neighborhoods and be embraced by both.”
Gillon quotes journalist Jack Newfield, who said, “No one came after him who could speak simultaneously for the unemployed Black teenager and the white worker trapped in a dead-end job and feeling misunderstood.”
Newfield was on the train and saw “tens of thousands of poor Blacks, already bereft from the loss of Martin Luther King, weeping and waving goodbye on one side of the railroad tracks.” And he saw “tens of thousands of almost poor whites on the other side of the train, waving American flags, standing at attention, hands over their hearts, tears running down their faces.”
Gillon believes that “as the nation grows even more fragmented, it is useful to reflect on a moment in time when, through his passion and commitment, RFK managed to hold together the delicate center of American politics … .”
And it was that center, even amid the violence and turmoil of the 1960s, that produced great social progress and historic legislation — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
