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Ladies and gentlemen, I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening

because I have some very sad news for all of you. Could you lower those signs please?

It was supposed to be a good night. Robert F. Kennedy, confidant to his late brother,

former attorney general, current United States senator from New York, and possible future

president of the United States, was due in inner city, Indianapolis for a big rally.

As the afternoon of Thursday, April 4, 1968 faded, John Lewis, the hero of the nonviolent

civil rights movement, was on the ground awaiting his candidate's arrival.

Lewis recalled that the weather was brisk overcast, but a large crowd had turned out a

good crowd, about a thousand people, almost all of them black, all of them upbeat, eager

and excited to hear the man who might well be the next president of the United States.

It was a moment of promise and of possibility. Kennedy was preaching the gospel of an interracial

democracy, of a rising tide lifting all boats, of one nation, not competing tribes of race

and class.

Then came the news from Tennessee. John Lewis, who loved Martin Luther King Jr., heard

it from a Kennedy advance man Walter Sheridan. John Sheridan said, we just got word.

That Dr. King has been shot in Memphis.

Lewis went blank. The grief was consuming, paralyzing, unspeakable.

He had he recalled no feeling, no thoughts, no words. I was obliterated, blown beyond

any sensations whatsoever. I was numb, frozen, stunned, stock still inside and out.

I just stood there, not moving, not thinking, as the cold Indiana wind stirred the dirt

around my feet. Robert Kennedy was on his way to see Lewis and to address a crowd who

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