from The Nation:
BLOG | Posted 04/04/2008 @ 09:44am
King, Kennedy and April 4, 1968 Forty years ago today, on the Democratic presidential campaign trail in Indiana, one of the most remarkable moments in American political history occurred.
New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was locked in a race for the Democratic nomination with another liberal insurgent, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, and the party establishment's emerging choice: Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Kennedy had not yet won any primaries. His candidacy remained untested, as did his faith that it was possible to cross lines of racial division and unite a nation that was struggling to overcome the awful legacies of racial segregation, discrimination and fear.
Kennedy arrived on April 4, 1968 to make his stand in Indiana, a racially-divided state where Alabama segregationist George Wallace had run well in a Democratic presidential primary four years earlier.
That night, before he appeared in Indianapolis, Kennedy learned that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Nobel Peace Prize-winning champion of the nation's civil rights movement, had been assassinated in Memphis. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=306354