RFK’s funeral train

Monday August 15th 2016 by abagond

On June 8th 1968, after Robert Kennedy’s funeral in New York, a train carried his body at half speed 364 km to Arlington Cemetery, across the river from Washington, DC.

From Thurston Clarke’s account:

Passengers stared out the windows and saw men in undershirts, sport shirts, uniforms, and suits: crying, saluting, standing at attention, and holding their hard hats over their hearts. They saw women in madras shorts, house dresses, and Sunday dresses: weeping, kneeling, covering their faces, and holding up children as if telling them, “You look at Robert Kennedy, and that’s the way you should lead your life.” They saw people who were also mourning Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, although they may not have known it, and people who were weeping because they sensed that this signified the end of something, although they were not sure what. They saw some of the same derelict factories, creaky tenements, shuttered stores, and crime-battered neighborhoods that anyone traveling this route today still sees, but might not be seeing had Robert Kennedy lived. …

Because anyone who owned an American flag had flown it or brought it, they saw flags flying at half-staff in front of factories and schools, dipped by American Legion honor guards, and waved by Cub Scouts. Because anyone owning a uniform had worn it, they saw policemen in gold braid and white gloves, fire companies standing at attention next to their trucks, and veterans in Eisenhower jackets and overseas caps snapping salutes.

They saw the kind of white working-class backlash voters who had supported former Alabama governor George Wallace’s 1964 candidacy for the Democratic nomination, and would vote again for Wallace or Republican Richard Nixon in November, although until four days before many had planned to vote for Robert Kennedy. Today, these whites had not only turned out to mourn a politician who was an acknowledged champion of black Americans, and who had condemned an American war as “deeply wrong”; they had decided that the most fitting way to do this was to wear a uniform and wave a flag. …

Richard Harwood of the Washington Post saw “trembling nuns” and “adoring children,” reported that blacks cried most, and concluded, “It may not have had the grandeur of the last train ride Abraham Lincoln took through the weeping countryside a century ago. But no one could be sure of that.”

Not since Lincoln had black Americans embraced a white politician as passionately and completely. They, as well as many whites, feared that Robert Kennedy’s assassination, like Lincoln’s, had eliminated the only leader who could heal and unify a wounded nation. …

They saw a long-haired girl on a horse, five nuns standing on tiptoes in a yellow pickup truck, a crowd of young black militants with Afros holding up clenched fists, white policemen cradling black children in their arms, a family with a sign reading THE GEBHARTS ARE SAD, and five black boys in church clothes, each holding a rose. … a black woman in Baltimore clutching a hand-lettered sign that said HOPE.