April 4, 1968: How RFK saved Indianapolis

This story originally appeared at IndyStar on April 2, 2015.

Every April 4 several hundred residents of Indianapolis gather at 17th and Broadway streets to remember what happened there in 1968.

It was the day Robert F. Kennedy likely saved Indianapolis, a story less told.

Kennedy, who was running for president, was scheduled to make a campaign speech here in the days before the Indiana Democratic primary. He was popular among the black community, and in an effort to get more blacks registered to vote, he wanted to speak in the heart of Indianapolis' inner-city.

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Shortly before his speech, as Kennedy's plane landed in Indianapolis, the senator from New York learned that Martin Luther King Jr. had died from an assassin's bullet.

Indianapolis Mayor Richard Lugar, fearing a race riot, told Kennedy's staff that his police could not guarantee Kennedy's safety at 17th and Broadway. Racial violence indeed would later sweep the country, with riots in more than 100 cities, 39 people killed and more than 2,000 injured.

Lugar urged Kennedy to cancel his speech. But Kennedy insisted that he and his people go on and go alone, without police.

The audience in Indianapolis was estimated at only about 2,500 people, but they were influencers, members of young, somewhat radical black groups like the College Room, the Watoto Wa Simba, the Black Panthers and the Black Radical Action Project.

Mary Evans, a 16-year-old junior at North Central High School, was in the crowd. She was headstrong and political, and she insisted on seeing Kennedy. She and a friend attended the rally with the friend's nervous father.

Evans was white and from a tony Northside family, but she was progressive and inquisitive and was not uncomfortable in the mostly black crowd. At first.

But as she waited for Kennedy, who was more than an hour late, word suddenly spread that King had been shot. The word was that he had survived after a gunman had tried to kill him. The gunman was presumed to be white.

"The temperature changed," Evans recalls. "I felt people started looking at me. Someone would take a step away, like I was a symbol of racism.

"I felt really white. I was really scared."

She thought about bolting but was in unfamiliar territory and had no idea which way to run.

At about 9 p.m. Kennedy arrived. He knew more than his audience knew — he knew King was dead. He stood on a flat bed truck and faced the crowd and laid it out. The crowd gasped in shock.

With practically no time to prepare — he had come straight from the airport — and speaking off the cuff, Kennedy told the news with such compassion and empathy that when he finished many in the crowd departed sad though not hateful and in at least one notable case with renewed resolve to make the world better.

"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," Kennedy said. "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."

William Crawford, a member of the Black Radical Action Project, had stood about 20 feet from Kennedy. "Look at all those other cities," Crawford says today. "I believe it would have gone that way (in Indianapolis) had not Bobby Kennedy given those remarks."

"The sincerity of Bobby Kennedy's words just resonated," Crawford says, "especially when he talked about his brother."

Kennedy had not spoken publicly about President John F. Kennedy's assassination since Nov. 22, 1963, writes Ray E. Boomhower in his 2008 book "Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary."

Now he did, to maximum effect. The moment he started speaking the air cleared, the hostility evaporated.

Evans sensed it deep down.

"It was like the feeling some people get in church," she says. "I was scared, and as soon as Kennedy spoke, I wasn't scared. I no longer felt white and isolated. I felt united in sadness with everyone else."

Today the greatness of Kennedy's speech seems obvious, but at the time it created little stir, even locally.

There were two key reasons for this:

■Eugene C. Pulliam, publisher of the state's two most powerful newspapers, the Indianapolis Star and Indianapolis News, was no fan of Kennedy and saw to it he received minimal coverage; Kennedy's remarks were buried inside a larger political story under the headline: "Young Hoosiers Back 'Favorite Son' Branigan."

■The speech was, after all, just a speech. As news, it was immediately buried by King's death, his funeral and the rioting that followed.

"Big news trumps smaller stories," says James Brown, the retired, longtime dean of the journalism school at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "But as time goes on and people look back and analyze, you'd think there'd be more discussion of (Kennedy's speech). I don't think the story has received the prominence it deserves."

Kennedy talked for just five minutes, yet people who study speeches list his remarks among history's great speeches (The website American Rhetoric ranks it 17th, above JFK's more famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.)

When he finished the crowd pressed near him and tried to touch him, and when he drove away they went away mournful, not vengeful. Some were changed.

Crawford had been working at the post office and studying computer data processing. Inside of two months he had quit both and was managing a bookstore at 23rd and Meridian streets that sold progressive and radical political publications as well as African art and clothing.

A year later he went to work as a community organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and in 1972 was elected to the Indiana General Assembly. He served for 40 years. He's 79 and on April 4 will be at the commemoration, as he always is.

The day after the speech, Mary Evans flew to Chicago to visit her grandmother. She recalls looking at Chicago from the window of the plane and seeing plumes of smoke and fire, the aftermath of anger and heartbreak.

Robert Kennedy went on to win the Indiana Democratic primary. He was assassinated two months later in California.

Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.