His fight may have been cut short before they were born, but he would have recognized the struggles they face: the children of janitors and gardeners, dishwashers and security guards, Mexican, Salvadoran, Korean, Filipino, their adolescent yearnings and hardships percolating through the most densely populated corner of Los Angeles. Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy delivered his final address, he was standing in their library—then the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel—celebrating his victory in California’s Democratic primary and deploring “the division, the violence, the disenchantment with our society.” Moments later, exiting through the hotel pantry, Kennedy was assassinated by gunman Sirhan Sirhan.
Today more than 4,000 students inhabit those grounds, a campus of six learning centers, kindergarten through 12th grade, that operate as the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.
In this era of historical reassessment, of re-examining the figures worthy of a pedestal, RFK seems an enduringly relevant namesake for a school serving the sons and daughters of Los Angeles’ foreign-born working poor. A 40-foot-tall portrait of the slain presidential candidate—painted by Shepard Fairey—looms over a central courtyard. Other murals, plaques and framed black-and-white photographs documenting the life and times of Robert Kennedy crowd the interior walls. A display case of campaign buttons (bearing the slogans “Viva Kennedy” and “Kennedy is the remedy”) graces the foyer of the school’s auditorium—once the site of the Ambassador Hotel’s storied nightclub and celebrity watering hole, the Cocoanut Grove. Even the campus mascot, the Bobcats, is a nod to the liberal folk hero.
[For more on this story by Jesse Katz, go to https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rfk-killed-diverse-student-body-fulfills-vision-america-180967511/#6OIEI4Y4Epbs8EZ5.99]
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