On the night of April 4, 1968, despondent presidential hopeful Sen. Robert F. Kennedy climbed onto the back of a flat-bed truck in the heart of Indianapolis’ Black community, intending to share with the unsuspecting 2000-person crowd the grim news: Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Instinctively, a heartbroken Kennedy spoke the healing words of a man familiar with the pain of loss, pleading to the crowd for an “effort to understand with compassion and love.” Moved by his elegiac words, the Black people in the crowd felt their rage was understood — while riots and violence broke out in cities across the country in the hours and days that followed, Indianapolis grieved peacefully.
Fifty-two years later, a new generation of terrorized and despairing Black Americans seriously doubt the ability of the political establishment to deliver a moral leader — a source of radical hope — like Robert F. Kennedy. Today in this country, there is a crisis in political leadership: many Black Americans no longer feel understood by those tasked with governance.
Catalyzed by the public lynching of George Floyd, thousands have taken to the streets across the country — and the world — demanding a national reckoning with the endemic American forces of racial terror, police violence, and structural anti-Blackness. In response, the neofascist President Donald Trump has abdicated all democratic leadership responsibility, threatening to invoke a two-century-old law to deploy active-duty military nationwide to “dominate” protestors, quoting the violent words of a segregationist police chief while labeling Minneapolis protestors “thugs,” and authorizing the deployment of chemical irritants and militarized police forces on peaceful protestors to clear the way for a political photo op.
The failure of the American democratic project is clear: Time and time again, American society refuses to recognize the humanity of Black people. When the contemporary political leadership class proves unable to meaningfully protect Black life, Black people must demand a new political order.
In this moment of serious crisis, the moral leadership of Robert F. Kennedy — perhaps the last White presidential candidate to be trusted by Black America — is a shining affirmation that the promise of democratic governance can still be met. How did the wealthy and White Kennedy earn the respect and adoration of millions of Black Americans during the most racially tense year in modern American history? Unlike the trajectory of many politicians, his political maturation brought him to the deeply unsettling voices at the margins of American society and led him to embody an ethic of compassion, a commitment to truth and justice that is largely absent in American political leadership today.
Robert F. Kennedy in Public
Robert F. Kennedy still matters today precisely because he was able to do what most in his position were incapable or unwilling to: inviting compassion into the bloodstream of American electoral politics. The Kennedy enshrined into popular American folklore is the public servant who bore witness to the country’s most uncomfortable truths, fighting side by side with Cesar Chavez and the striking Mexican American farmworkers demanding economic justice, visiting the forgotten streets and ignored inhabitants of the Mississippi Delta where Jim Crow racism and poverty were so deeply intertwined, and speaking candidly at the impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation on the oppression that Native Americans have experienced at the hands of the U.S. government.
But Kennedy was not always venerated: Early in his career he was a hawkish McCarthyite who prosecuted suspected communist sympathizers, authorized wiretapping on every major civil rights advocate as attorney general, and was viewed as insensitive to civil rights struggles by Black political leaders. He publicly opposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s methods of nonviolent direct action, famously advising him that the 1963 Birmingham riots were ill-timed, which likely rendered Kennedy the subject of King’s scathing critique in Letter From a Birmingham Jail of the “White moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.”
Nonetheless, the lesson that Kennedy provides both current and future public servants is the human capacity for moral transformation. It’s apparent from the literature that his engagement with distressed Black activists and his personal experience of tragedy — the assasination of his brother, President John F. Kenendy — heightened his sensitivity to injustice and his ability to relate to its victims.
The Art of Compassionate Leadership
Kennedy’s public life is a tutorial in compassionate leadership and a model for all current and future public servants to follow. First, he teaches the need to get close to suffering, seeking to understand it beyond the confines of briefings. In doing so, a public servant may disable a human inclination to coldheartedness and develop a hypersensitivity to injustice, attempting to view the world through the lens of the weak and vulnerable.
Second, Kennedy’s story shows that a compassionate public servant must commit to the quest for truth and justice, courageously accepting the costs they may incur in that quest. For Kennedy, this often meant sacrificing the votes of racist Southern Democrats and Vietnam War supporters to uphold his moral convictions.
Lastly, Kennedy had an acute awareness of his own positionality and propensity to be wrong: He recognized that one’s stance within a debate and the urgency of their demands is greatly influenced by one’s position in society. An exemplar for all public servants, Kennedy was able to see beyond his own status of wealth and growing power, engaging in public life with a level of integrity and decency that is rare in the nation’s history of political leadership.
1968 and 2020
Though the analogies between 1968 and 2020 are imperfect, today’s explosion of pain and rage over the slaughter of yet another Black body is chillingly similar. Then, it was King’s assasination; this time, it is the barbaric murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery and too many more by White vigilantes — some cowering behind the impunity of a police badge.
In Trump’s America, as a pandemic disproportionately threatens Black life, Black people are forced to endure the sting of pungent tear gas and the bruises inflicted by rubber bullets, sacrificing their own health to once again publicly diagnose the disease of White supremacy. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who holds significantly more support among Black voters, jokes that Black people “ain’t Black” if they don’t vote for him, establishing himself as an arbiter of Blackness and callously treating the politics of Black people as uniquely facile.
It is impossible not to imagine how Kennedy would lead in this moment. His likely response is made clear by his remarks to his wealthy White supporters at the Cleveland City Club the day after King’s death.
“Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them,” Kennedy said, addressing the issue of racial violence. “Repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.” Though unfamiliar with the racial literacy lexicon, the sickness that he observed infecting the soul of White America was White supremacy.
To be clear, Kennedy would unequivocally condemn rioting and looting, but he would find an outsized focus on those actions misleading: It saps attention from the real issue of state violence against hundreds of Black, poor, and working-class people. He spoke to the White audience of a more pernicious kind of violence than the burning of a convenience store: “the violence of institutions,” Kennedy said, characterized by “indifference and inaction and slow decay.” Committed to truth, he would condemn the culture of impunity in the nation’s policing institutions that allow them to exert unchecked social control over Black bodies.
Rather than trying to divide, Kennedy would seek to heal, expressing compassion and understanding for the millions of Black Americans imprisoned in a pattern of terror and hopelessness. His solidarity would not come without a critique of the repressive apparatus of militarized police forces that provoke confrontations with peaceful protestors, a form of repression that breeds a delegitimization of police authority and degradation of civil society.
Decidedly, Robert F. Kennedy would do what he does best: search in his own heart for a “human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence” and align himself in the struggle of those who are suffering — all while galvanizing the rest of White America to do the same.
When Will Black Lives Matter?
To be sure, no singular messianic leader will deliver the nation from its practices of anti-Black policing and the stain of a centuries-old White supremacist social, political and economic order. Nonetheless, the survival of Black people in America depends, in part, on electing a new political class of compassionate leaders. Only then can we collectively formulate a viable political vision for what an anti-racist democratic society can look like. Until this shared humanity is built into the fabric of all of America’s institutions, Black people will continue to challenge the existence of those institutions, marching through the streets to remind White America yet again: Black Lives Matter.
Image source: Image by Sven Walnum is licensed under CC0 1.0.