How does Kennedy use rhetoric to advance his purpose? Cite evidence from the text in your answer. RFK’s Speech Following the Death of MLK
By Senator Robert F. Kennedy
1968
Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), served as U. S. Attorney General from 1961 to 1964 before becoming
a U. S. Senator for New York in 1964. He delivered this speech after the civil rights leader Martin Luther King
Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. While campaigning for president two months later, Robert Kennedy
was assassinated as well. As you read, takes note on how Kennedy uses rhetoric to make his speech more
persuasive.
I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow
citizens, and people who love peace all over the
world, and that is that Martin Luther King was
shot and killed tonight.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and
to justice for his fellow human beings, and he
died because of that effort.
In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the
United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind
of a nation we are and what direction we want to
move in. For those of you who are black--
considering the evidence there evidently is that
there were white people who were responsible--
you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and
a desire for revenge. We can move in that
direction as a country, in great polarization--black
people amongst black, white people amongst
white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace
that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand
with compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of
such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.
I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in
the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus.1 He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon the heart until, in our own despair,2
against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of
God.

RFK’s Speech Following the Death of MLK by Senator Robert F. Kennedy is in the public domain.
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred;
what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and
compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our
country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s
true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for
understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will
have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not
the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live
together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide3
in
our land.
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man
and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.