RFK's speech in apartheid South Africa remains relevant 50 years after his assassination
By James Hohmann
June 5 at 9:06 AM
THE BIG IDEA: Fifty years ago tonight, Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles after winning the Democratic primary for president in California. The 42-year-old died of his wounds the next day. Two years to the day before his assassination, on June 6, 1966, the senator delivered perhaps the greatest speech of his life at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
A young student leader named Ian Robertson, who ran the National Union of South African Students, invited Kennedy to come for their Day of Affirmation, when members of the multiracial group, which resisted the apartheid regime, rededicated themselves to the ideals of freedom. The tradition started after the government banned nonwhite students from universities in 1959.
South Africa reluctantly agreed to grant Kennedy a visa to the country, and authorities only relented because they were worried about the optics of turning him away. The government, which had just expelled a New York Times reporter for critical coverage, denied entry to 40 print and television journalists who wanted to cover Kennedy’s trip.
Two weeks before Kennedy’s arrival, the government banned Robertson, 21, from participating in public life for five years because of his activism. The student who had invited Kennedy to speak was forbidden to be in a room with more than one other person at a time. An empty chair was left on stage as a symbol of his absence. “It's too bad he can't be with us today,” said Kennedy.
Before an audience that was all white — the government wouldn’t have it any other way — Kennedy delivered a paean to the freedom of speech, protest and the press. “The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any Western society,” he said. “The essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.”
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