Bobby Kennedy s death 50 years ago this week was more than a tragic political assassination. His presidential campaign s message of defiant hope resonated with a broad swath of politically marginalized Americans, anticipated the rise of Barack Obama s multiracial coalition, and placed racial justice at the center of American democracy in an unprecedented and transformational way.
Peniel Joseph
Robert F. Kennedy s groundbreaking campaign for president ended in the early hours of June 5, 1968. Shot shortly after winning the California Democratic primary, he died the next day. Historians often identify Kennedy s assassination, coming two months after Dr. Martin Luther King s horrific death, as a capstone to a year marked by angry demonstrations, political violence, and a degree of polarization that foreshadowed the stark divisions of our own time.
While 1968 is rightfully remembered as a year of violence, chaos, and death, it was also one filled with hope. The year was filled with the hope of sharecroppers, welfare activists, and ordinary citizens who joined the Poor People s Campaign Martin Luther King had set in motion in a caravan to the nation s capital -- one that continued in the form of Resurrection City even after King was killed. It was shaped by the hope of thousands of volunteers who went door-to-door to elect a presidential candidate who many believed understood the pain of racism, violence, injustice, and death, having witnessed it politically and experienced it personally.
Bobby Kennedy s assassination and his remarkably public evolution from the center-right, Cold War wing of the Democratic Party to one of the leading voices of its progressive wing made him an icon of that hope.
My memories of 68: Chaos in black and white
Although now widely recognized as a champion of racial and political liberalism, Bobby Kennedy did not start the 1960s that way. The pugnacious younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, Bobby served, in his capacity as attorney general, as his brother s chief political enforcer, strategist, and confidant.
Bobby proved slow to recognize the struggle for black equality as a transcendent movement for democracy, focusing instead on how political unrest damaged the President s legislative progress at home and embarrassed America overseas. He identified Martin Luther King Jr. as a potentially dangerous thorn in the side of the Kennedy administration, approving secret FBI wiretaps against the civil rights leader.
After the assassination of his brother John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Bobby mourned by taking long walks and reading Greek poetry. He was attorney general until he resigned in September 1964, assuming the role of crusading senator from New York, a reluctantly bitter beneficiary of the Lyndon Johnson landslide.
Kennedy and King moved along parallel lines after 1964. Sen. Kennedy s curiosity about the plight of the poor and marginalized grew into a rage against political inequality in America, just as King s concerns led him to embrace a Poor People s Movement. More politically cautious as a senator than King was as a social justice leader, Kennedy nonetheless toured some of the poorest sections of the United States, broke with President Johnson on Vietnam, and became one of the loudest elected officials in the country in advocating for racial and economic justice in America.
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When he ran for president in 1968, Kennedy s reliance on a core group of young and multiracial volunteers and supporters anticipated the Obama coalition that successfully elected the nation s first black president. Kennedy s assassination delayed, but did not end, political and organizing efforts to build and promote multiracial democracy in America.
In an age where racial polarization could be witnessed in the sheer volume of urban violence erupting across the nation s landscape, Kennedy s call for understanding, an end to violence, and peace offered a mainstream articulation of King s call for a beloved community. "We cannot separate ourselves, no matter where we live," Kennedy argued during one of his campaign stops, "from the problems and the troubles and the difficulties that face the whole of the United States."
In an age where many white Americans from urban centers to rural hamlets to suburbs felt besieged by the fears of black racial advancement and black violence, Bobby Kennedy remained wildly popular with groups of white voters who might otherwise comfortably support George Wallace or Richard Nixon. Kennedy s populist message suggested that the goals of black citizenship, reducing poverty, and an honorable end to the Vietnam War were not incompatible.
America made a promise in 1968. It s time to keep it
Kennedy s extemporaneous announcement ("Ladies and gentleman, I have some very sad news for all of you and all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world") of King s death to a crowd in Indianapolis found him ruminating on how the death of his older brother had changed him. Kennedy, who kept his distance from King in life, now embraced him in death, attending his funeral in Atlanta, and for many, becoming a living symbol of King s dream at the national political level.
Yet the Kennedy legend at times obscures identification with the flawed man who actually lived. Personal tragedy transformed Kennedy, allowing him to, for the first time in his life, empathize with black folk and political underdogs of all stripes. He remained, at times, overly cautious, best exemplified by his late decision to run for president and his inability to craft a deeper political alliance with Dr. King.
Such a missed opportunity is magnified by the fact that, during his last years, Kennedy learned perhaps his most important lesson from King: that the struggle for racial justice represented American democracy s core mission.
In his final act, Bobby Kennedy embraced this mission, imbuing his short-lived presidential campaign with a drive for justice, equality, and multiracial democracy that offered a tantalizing glimpse into the future. The passion of Bobby Kennedy to embrace racial and economic justice as the beating heart of American democracy made 1968 the dawn of a greater national consciousness about social justice, citizenship, and equality that resonates just as deeply now as it did then.
