I HAVE BAD NEWS

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.

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and justice for his fellow human beings, and he died for that effort.

In this difficult day for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what kind and what direction we want to move in. 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 for 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 difficult times.

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom from the awful grace of God."

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.

So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love – a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

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 make gentle the life of this world.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.

This speech was given by Robert F. Kennedy, on April 4, 1968 in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the heart of the inner city. RFK was warned by the police that he could not be protected in the event of a riot. He went anyway.

That night riots broke out in over one hundred U.S. cities, but not in Indianapolis, where the crowd went home weeping, but not rioting.

We are frequently told that as a nation, we are hopelessly divided, that we have become increasingly tribal, that our lines of separation have become permanently hardened.

Maybe we just need to bring the Indianapolis speech into our classrooms and never vote for any man or woman who cannot pass a quiz on its context or content.