On the night of King's death, Robert Kennedy was scheduled to deliver a campaign address to African-Americans in the ghetto areas of Indianapolis. Instead, he delivered an extemporaneous eulogy about King in which he praised King's struggle for justice and his nonviolence attempts to seek justice, asked his audience to pursue that justice, and spoke publicly, for the first time, about John F. Kennedy's assassination.
One of the most important parts of the speech occurs when Kennedy discusses his fatalistic beliefs:
"My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God."
Rather than follow the strict Greek interpretation of fatalism, Robert Kennedy believed that through suffering humans could gain knowledge-- "in agony, we gain wisdom." This may have been the most important lesson the audience learned that night.
In the following weeks after King's death, riots occurred in 76 cities, 26 people died, 2000 injured, and 28,000 were jailed. However, while most of the major cities erupted in violence forty years ago, Indianapolis did not.
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