<Begin Segment 23>

TI: After Bob Kennedy was assassinated, what was your view of America at that point? It must have been difficult to, to see this happen, and for someone to have spoken out and then to be assassinated. I mean, what were you thinking?

CS: Well, assassination has been a way of life in our great America. Somehow or the other, I did not see it as being the death knell for democracy. And I'm not sure that Bob Kennedy's death was directly related to his speaking out. I think Sirhan Sirhan may have been mentally ill, I'm not, and not in a legal sense, but I've never understood the motivation behind his actions. With Martin Luther King, Jr., I think the person who killed him was acting purely out of racial motives, because he was the outspoken person that he was. Internationally recognized, nationally recognized, not always highly regarded by people in his own country. And even now, as a matter of fact, I recall when Martin Luther King was assassinated, one of my prosecutors, who was the city attorney, reported to me that in the Seattle Police Department, their reaction was, "It's about time." And so this is not to condemn the Seattle Police Department, but it is a reflection on the attitude of a public, if someone whose responsibility it is to uphold law and order comments after someone is assassinated that, "It's about time," then you have to understand that it was not unusual.

And so, fortunately, we have not suffered through that kind of activity in recent years, and I hope we don't. But somehow or the other, the direction society was taking in the '60s, the protests, the murders in places like Mississippi, for example, Medgar Evers' assassination, which affected me more so than any of the other assassinations, and you get a history of some of those things. The three civil rights workers who were buried in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the reality of that strikes home, especially when I recognize that the widow of one of them is a lawyer in Seattle, a dear friend of mine. And I didn't know she was his widow until they had the recognition of the three in the White House, and she was a spokesperson for the surviving families. But those were things that happened, and I come from a period of time when we had uncontrolled lynchings. The lynching of Chinese in Seattle, for example. The lynching of blacks indiscriminately in southern states. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization which is ludicrous on the one hand, but on the other hand, exercised a great deal of power over the lives of people. And so to have the background of knowing about the lynching of people, and the fact that we could never get passed in Congress what was commonly called an anti-lynching bill -- even now we don't have an anti-lynching bill, but now we have hate crime laws that come into play. But for thirty or forty years, every effort to make it a federal crime to lynch someone failed. It never got through Congress. And so human life is or was of little value. And Billie Holiday had a song she would sing called "Southern Trees Bear Strange Fruit." And it's a haunting song, but it nevertheless focuses attention on the fact that blacks in America are likely to be hanging from trees. The Emmett Till matter just recently coming into focus because of a new investigation into his lynching. Horrible, horrible thing. You see photographs of Emmett Till's body, at the insistence of his mother, in an open casket. She wanted the world to see what happened to her son. And after all these years, like, thirty or more years, a new investigation has arisen to find out what actually happened and who was actually responsible for it.

But you sort of get accustomed to the fact that things will happen, people will be murdered. It's sort of like the street murders, the drive-by shootings and things. It becomes a way of life and you're not shocked. We should be shocked any time a person dies, but I am not shocked when I read that in Tacoma, they found a woman who had been shot four times, and a man shot two times, the woman died and the man is still holding on for his life, they don't know who did it. But that happens, and why have we reached the point in our culture where we accept these things? The good people among us -- and I'm one of the good people -- what am I doing about it, other than talking about it? Why can't we, in our modern society, come up with devices by which we can avoid or eliminate the useless deaths of people, men, women, and children? And it isn't necessarily racially motivated. The assassination of Robert Kennedy, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., one African American and two whites, their lives were lost, and they should not have been lost. And so who is responsible? What are the answers? We know the questions, but we don't know the answers.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.