Fifty years ago this week, America lost Martin Luther King Jr. to an assassin’s gun, only to see Robert F. Kennedy cut down two months later.
While their deaths have long linked them in the public’s mind, it’s the way they lived — agitating for civil rights and for the end of the Vietnam war — that made them “Rebel Spirits.”
That’s the title of the New-York Historical Society’s show of correspondence, ephemera and photos, many of the last taken by Lawrence Schiller. Years before he snapped Marilyn Monroe, Barbra Streisand and a slew of other stars, Schiller shadowed Richard Nixon during the 1960 presidential campaign — a race, the 81-year-old Schiller says, “everybody was sure Nixon would win.”
In February 1960, Dr. King moved his family from Montgomery to Atlanta so he could devote more time to the Southern Christian Leadership Council and its freedom struggle. Two months later, the Ku Klux Klan set a cross ablaze on their front lawn.Unidentified photographer/courtesy Getty Images
Robert F. Kennedy is shown aboard his campaign plane in June 1968, en route to the West Coast prior to his campaign stops in California. The photo was taken just days before his assassination in Los Angeles.Lawrence Schiller/courtesy Lawrence Schiller Archive“Everybody” was wrong. And when Nixon conceded to John F. Kennedy, Schiller went to California’s Ambassador Hotel to photograph it.
“A tear dropped from Nixon’s eye,” he tells The Post. “Little did I know that Bobby Kennedy would be standing in the same hotel at the same podium, moments away from his own tragedy.”
As seen through his wide-angle lens, their personalities were very different.
“Martin Luther King was an inspirational leader,” says Schiller, who found RFK “tactical, political” and “ruthless,” at least when he was managing older brother John’s presidential campaign. “I remember him saying to me, ‘All is fair in love and war,’” Schiller recalls. “Nothing mattered [to him] but winning.”
That changed, Schiller says. One of his favorite photos is that of a pensive RFK looking out the window of a plane. “You see him thinking — it was no longer about knee-jerk reactions,” Schiller says of that portrait, taken only days before Kennedy’s death.
Schiller met Dr. King in 1965, when riots roiled the Watts ghetto. The photographer captured King in mid-speech as he urged an end to the violence, and you can sense King’s hold on the crowd.
But the most riveting image in the show, Schiller says, was the one taken by someone else: an unidentified photographer who captured the moment King held one of his children, staring at the cross the Ku Klux Klan set ablaze on his lawn.
“Rebel Spirits: Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.” runs through May 20 at the New-York Historical Society, NyHistory.org
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Watts, in 1965Lawrence Schiller