Robert F. Kennedy: A Californian Reflects on His 1968 Campaign and Message of Hope and Reconciliation

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Assassination 40 Years Ago

By Marty D. Omoto
Director/Organizer
California Disability Community Action Network

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation… It is from numerous diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” - Robert F. Kennedy

In the midst of a history making presidential campaign in 2008, many Americans will pause and reflect today and tomorrow, marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, after his triumph in the California presidential primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Kennedy was shot just minutes after midnight on June 5, and died just after 1 AM on June 6th - barely two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis and four and half years after the murder of his brother, President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Kennedy was only 42 years old when he died in the early hours of June 6th. [pictured left campaigning in Sacramento to a frenzied crowd, March 1968 just a few days after he announced his candidacy],

The loss of two remarkable national leaders to violence in a time span of two months seems unbelievable now, 40 years later. And both the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and King occurred just a few years after President John F. Kennedy was killed, murders of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and others, and combined with escalating fighting and deaths in Vietnam, riots in April and in the summer in many American cities and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, traumatized the nation in ways that perhaps it has never recovered from.

Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign brought together an unlikely coalition of young people, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, blue collar white workers and families in a string of primary victories, in Indiana and Nebraska, and Washington, DC and one stunning defeat in Oregon by Sen. Eugene McCarthy and then a comeback victory a week later in the California and South Dakota presidential primaries.

Current Assemblymember Mervyn Dymally - who was a a member of the State Assembly back then in 1968 (before serving as Lt. Governor, then later as a member of Congress, then back to the Assembly), was an early supporter of Kennedy, as was fellow Assemblymember Willie Brown. There is a photo of RFK speaking to a crowd of largely African Americans in Watts, with Dymally standing just below Kennedy.