The Charlie Kirk tragedy again reminds me of how similar our current times are to the late 1960s. Then, we were getting ever more deeply involved in the Vietnam War. Today, the same pivotal questions confront us in the Near East and Ukraine. Should we increase our commitment to support another democracy? Would such an increased commitment risk WWIII?
In April 1968, the preeminent civil rights leader of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King , Jr. was gunned down in Tennessee. In June 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate who had a very good chance of being elected, was killed in California.
In July and September of 2024, there were two assassination attempts on a leading presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump. And on September 10th, Charlie Kirk, a young and increasingly influential leader in the 21st C., was gunned down in Utah. King in 1968 was the leader of a movement trying to gain greater racial diversity and tolerance in America in much the same way that Kirk was trying to advance diversity and tolerance of thought – the lack of which is a civil rights issue in the 21st Century.
Our country learned its lessons from 1968. Although far from perfect, the America of 2025 is much more accepting of Black Americans than it was 57 years ago. Then, there were only 10 African Americans in the US Congress and no Black had ever been a senior leader in our government; today there are 64 Blacks in the US Congress – a 6x increase. Since then we have had Blacks serve in the highest offices of our government – e.g., President, Vice President, Minority Leader of the House, Secretary of State and Defense.
Will our country now learn from the violence of 2024/5 and move to address the underlying issues as it did in the 20th Century? King’s death called out Americans’ better angels? Will Kirk’s death do the same? Can Americans reject violence and instead begin to debate controversial topics in a civil and respectful fashion?
Last week’s annual survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) showed how extreme students’ attitude toward violence has become. In 2020 only 20% of students felt that the use of violence was acceptable to use against a speaker whose views were objectionable. In this year’s survey, which was conducted long before the Kirk assassination, one in three students surveyed viewed violence as acceptable. To be clear, both one in three and one in five are grossly alarming ratios. It is not just the snapshot number, but the trend that is keeping me up at night. The percentage of students holding extreme views on the use of violence was too high in 2020, but it’s even worse today.
In discussions in the past few days about possible causes of this alarming trend, students cited on campus messaging, the social media culture, parents as friends not disciplinarians, gaming and the secularization of America as possible causes. Whatever the cause, it is deeply ingrained and puts both university life and society at large in jeopardy.
Can Americans do as we did after the violence of the 1960s and improve our society as a result of this lesson? The early reactions of national leaders give me hope that we can. President Trump described the Kirk assassination as a “dark moment for America”. Former President Obama didn’t disagree with his successor when he said that “this kind of violence has no place in our democracy”. Will these green shoots of universal condemnation of violence hold? Will we respect and include others on our campuses who hold radically different political views? I pray that we will.
William Gruver is a Professor Emeritus at Bucknell University, a retired General Partner at Goldman Sachs, and a senior fellow at the Open Discourse Coalition.
