ELISABETH BUMILLER

New York Times

WASHINGTON — On the night in April 1968 that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, then a candidate for president, told a shocked and largely Black crowd in Indianapolis that "it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in."

"Those of you who are Black," he said, could be filled with "a desire for revenge." Or, he said, the nation could try to replace violence "with an effort to understand." It was considered one of the finest speeches of his life. But in the wake of King's death, riots, looting and arson erupted in more than 100 U.S. cities, and Kennedy was assassinated that June in California.

Today, the nation is at another polarized moment after the assassination of C

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