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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOn this day, June 8, 1968, Robert Kennedy's funeral train ran from NYC to DC
Along route of Robert Kennedys funeral train, [June 8,] 1968:
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Another scene from Robert Kennedys funeral train, [June 8,] 1968:
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I found this exhibit at
@SFMOMA
very moving - photos taken by Paul Fusco from the train carrying Robert Kennedys body; snapshots & home movies by the spectators; & a 70mm film reenactment of the trains journey by French artist Philippe Parreno.
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Wed Apr 4, 2018: Robert F. Kennedy's Funeral Train, Fifty Years Later
Hat tip, Trainorders: Nostalgia & History > Photo Essay on RFK Funeral Train
By Louis Menand April 3, 2018
The Train: RFKs Last Journey is an ingenious and, in a surprising way, affecting exhibition that opened last month at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Although the train in question is the one that, almost fifty years ago, carried Robert Kennedys body from New York City to Washington, D.C., for burial in Arlington Cemetery, the show is not about Kennedy. The show is about deathor, more exactly, about the relationship between photography and death. .... Robert Kennedy is now dead. He was shot in the head at 12:15 a.m., on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, moments after declaring victory in the California Democratic primary. He had been campaigning for President for not even three months. He never regained consciousness and died the following day. His body was flown to New York City, where, on June 8th, a funeral was held at St. Patricks Cathedral. Immediately afterward, the casket was put on a train to Washington.
The heart of the sfmoma show is a set of twenty-one photographs taken from aboard that train by a photographer named Paul Fusco. It was a last-minute assignment from Look, where Fusco was a staff photographer, and he assumed that his main task would be in Arlington, where Kennedy was to be buried next to his brother John. But when the train emerged from the Hudson River tunnel, Fusco was amazed to see people lining the tracks. He found a spot at an open window, and, for the eight hours it took the train to get to Washington, he shot picture after picture of the crowds who came out to witness Kennedys body being carried to its grave.
Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968. Photograph by Paul Fusco / Magnum / Courtesy Danziger Gallery
Those pictures eventually became some the most famous works of photojournalism from what was a golden age, the era of the big mass-circulation picture magazines: Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Paris Match, and Stern. Fusco carried three cameras with him on the train: two Leica rangefinder cameras and a Nikon S.L.R. For almost all of the shots, he used Kodachrome film, and he took around a thousand pictures. By the end of the journey, as dusk fell, his exposure times were up to one second.
Trains in the Northeast corridor do not run through upscale neighborhoods. The people who spontaneously turned out to watch the funeral train pass byKennedys biographer Evan Thomas says there were a millionwere, by appearance, mostly working class, and there were whites and African-Americans often standing in clusters together. In 2018, looking back at those images, as the train approaches the terminal and the light begins to fade, you realize that you are watching the final hours of the great Democratic coalition that had dominated American politics since the election of Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932the coalition that would fracture six months later with the election of Richard Nixon, and which is now as dead as Robert Kennedy.
....
Untitled, from the series RFK Funeral Train, 1968.Photograph by Paul Fusco / Magnum / Courtesy Danziger Gallery
The pictures won't link correctly from the article in The New Yorker. I took these images from an article in the New York Times:
By PHYLLIS TUCHMAN OCT. 30, 2017
One more article:
Text JAMES STEVENSON JUNE 1, 2008
PROCESSION: After Kennedys funeral in New York the morning of June 8, 1968, his body was transported to Washington. Mourners, about a million by some estimates, lined the tracks, and the trip, usually about four hours, took twice that long. Credit Paul Fusco
Sat Jun 8, 2019: Beschloss tweet: Bringing RFK home
MFGsunny
(2,356 posts)B Stieg
(2,410 posts)out of blocks and a toy train set. Still a sad day.
Thanks for posting.
TNNurse
(6,927 posts)NBachers
(17,122 posts)IronLionZion
(45,457 posts)his grave will be the most urine and feces covered grave in the world. It will be a world record.
northoftheborder
(7,572 posts)niyad
(113,344 posts)electric_blue68
(14,912 posts)I went to see the funeral procession at 34th St 3-4 blocks away from Penn Station where the train would depart.
I was 15 and my mom made my dad go with me because I was emotionally wreaked, and physically semi-out of it from a lack of sleep once I heard he'd been shot at around 4am that June 5. Besides tv we in NYC at the time had at night (after a day/eve of pop & rock) a radio talk show host who had all kinds of JFK & RFK people on from, ?hmm, late '67 onward off and on.
You can imagine what the 6/6 - 6/8 shows were like! Stayed up for much of that.
Then while I had to study for my PSAT's I watched the train once we got home from 34th St. So sorrowful, so moving.
Anyone remember when the crowd sang the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as they passed through Philadelphia PA?
Also seeing the Photos in color since we only had 2 B&W TVs to watch with is wonderful. Saw some of them probably in Life Magazine back then.
mobeau69
(11,145 posts)speech at BSU and the second time was at the airport in Muncie, IN. He was headed for Indianapolis. No one knew yet that MLK had just been shot and killed in Memphis, TN.