ARLINGTON, Va. — Fifty years after his death, Robert F. Kennedy’s words remain powerful. At ceremonies Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery, speakers paid homage to his oratory by simply reciting excerpts of his speeches to a crowd of several thousand..
Civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia quoted Kennedy’s speech after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred just two months before Kennedy himself was shot and killed.
“What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred but love, and wisdom, and compassion for one another,” Lewis said.
Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, read a quote from a 1966 speech Kennedy gave in apartheid-era South Africa.
“First is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills – against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man,” Gonzalez said.
Kennedy, a former attorney general, ran for president in 1968 and had won the California primary when he was shot June 5 at a hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day.
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