Two days later Kennedy and his wife , Ethel , attended an 8 a.m. Palm Sunday service at New Bethel Baptist Church in the riot zone . Stokely Carmichael , widely blamed for inciting local disorder , was among the others in the congregation . Kennedy , a devout Catholic , took communion with the rest of the parishioners , much to the chagrin of the Bishop of Washington . After the service he asked the minister , Walter E. Fauntroy , how bad the destruction was in the surrounding area . Fauntroy then walked Kennedy towards the worst devastation on 14th street . Ethel , aide Peter Edelman , Marian Wright Edelman ( wife of Peter Edelman ) , and a small group of reporters , local officials , and parishioners closely followed . People joined the crowd as it walked , becoming so large that a group of National Guardsmen mistook it for a mob of looters . Fearing a confrontation , they put on their gas masks and fixed their bayonets . A trailing police car quickly accelerated and parked itself in between the crowd and the guardsmen to prevent any incident from occurring . Fauntroy remembered , " When the guardsmen saw it was Bobby Kennedy , they took off their masks and let us through . They looked awfully relieved . " That evening Kennedy held a televised press conference on the possibility of a domestic Peace Corps-like program to reduce racism in white suburbs . On April 8 , Kennedy and his wife went , at the request of Coretta Scott King , to Atlanta to attend Martin Luther King Jr. 's funeral . That evening he held a meeting with his aides over how to get the attention of middle-class whites weary of the civil rights movement in order to relieve the racial tension in the country . Kennedy returned to Indiana and on April 10 delivered his third and final speech inspired by King 's death . Moving past his previous calls for compassion and an end to violence , he admonished whites to accept and welcome blacks into American society . Throughout the rest of the month , Kennedy toned down his campaign rhetoric and fixed on a theme of unity and reconciliation . He reiterated the same arguments he delivered in Cleveland about America 's internal faults through the rest of his campaign . " On the Mindless Menace of Violence " has been greatly overshadowed by Kennedy 's Indianapolis remarks and largely ignored by scholars , but it is still considered by some to be historically significant . Journalist Jack Newfield said the speech was " probably the best written text of the campaign , and perhaps of Kennedy 's public career . " Another journalist , David Halberstam , considered it " perhaps the best speech of the campaign , perhaps the best speech of his life . " Greenfield also later called the address " the best written speech of the campaign . " Mankiewicz wrote that it was " perhaps the best speech Robert Kennedy made during the campaign , and certainly one of the best of his career " and " the most eloquent and memorable of RFK 's view of humanity and the threats to its flowering and ... survival . " Journalist Jules Witcover said that the " speech was , in a very real sense , a turning point in the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy , " as it allowed him to find new themes around which to reorient his campaign . Following Kennedy 's assassination in June 1968 , Representative Charles Vanik of Ohio , in a speech before the House of Representatives , called the City Club address the late senator 's " most significant statement ... on crime and violence " . In Newfield 's opinion the speech was a suitable epitaph for Kennedy himself
Kennedy 's assassination
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
On the Mindless Menace of Violence