On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, Robert Kennedy stood before a crowd in Indianapolis and reached for Aeschylus. Not to sound learned. Not because dead Greeks were decoration. He reached there because tragedy had given him a language large enough for pain—and disciplined enough not to turn grief into vengeance.
The speech remains a lesson in moral authority. A city did not need optimism severed from reality. It needed truth spoken without surrender, and a leader willing to let private suffering deepen into public care.
Tragedy can become the relay by which one wounded generation teaches another how not to waste its pain.