Experiencing a Night that Changed History
On April 1968, a crowd gathered in an Indianapolis park at 17th and Broadway streets to hear Robert F. Kennedy speak during a campaign rally. Most of the people, who were both black and white, had no idea that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated earlier that evening in Memphis. Against the advice of many on his team, Kennedy chose to attend the rally and to deliver the devastating news. The impromptu words he spoke called for peace.
Visitors to the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center will experience what it was like to be in the stunned crowd that night in You Are There 1968: Robert F. Kennedy Speaks, opening Feb. 22. Revolutionary hologram technology is a crucial factor in moving visitors to be swept up in that historic moment.
“Those who were a part of the crowd compared what they saw and heard to a religious experience,” says Ray Boomhower, IHS senior editor and author of Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. “He reached out and touched their hearts with his words calling for compassion and understanding in the face of violence and bloodshed. One of the people I interviewed for the book who was at the speech remembered feeling as if the candidate had ‘laid his hands upon the audience’ and healed them, deflating the powerful anger that surged through the packed audience. The crowd walked away in pain, but with no thoughts of revenge. While countless cities across the country exploded in violence, Indianapolis remained calm.”
In addition to the park scene, the experience has a King/Kennedy Legacy Room featuring an ever-growing visitor-created art piece conceptualized in partnership with Big Car Gallery. Exhibits in the room put Kennedy’s speech in the context of the social and racial climate, political atmosphere and community setting of April 4, 1968. Clips from the documentary film A Ripple of Hope by Donald Boggs at Covenant Productions are sprinkled throughout the space, which also has an interactive touchscreen computer program about the power of words developed in partnership with the Peace Learning Center and the International Interfaith Initiative.
