Bobby resigned as Attorney General after John’s death and then ran successfully for the Senate seat of New York. He continued with his commitment to help the underprivileged and the poor and established the Beford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation to improve living conditions and employment opportunities for those in depressed areas in Brooklyn, and he visited areas of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and migrant workers’ camps to raise the public’s consciousness of the poverty that existed within the country.

He also traveled abroad to Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa to advance his message of human rights. He told students in Cape Town that “each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

He became increasingly concerned with the war in the Vietnam and publicly broke with the Johnson administration in 1966, urging him to stop the bombing and press for negotiations. He took responsibility for his role in the Kennedy administration’s policy in Southeast Asia and declared that the war could not be won militarily, proposing a three-point plan to bring it to an end.

Kennedy was facing challenges for the Democratic nomination from Senator Eugene McCarthy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey but quickly emerged as a serious contender as he won critical primaries in Indiana and Nebraska. Focus turned towards California and Kennedy received news that he had won (with 46% of the vote) in the early morning hours of June 5.

He left his 5th floor suite and went to the Embassy Ballroom to make a speech to his 1,800 supporters, concluding it with the words “let’s go to Chicago and win there!” and he had planned to go into the crowd to shake people’s hands. But, at the last minute, a change of plan meant that he had to give a press conference and he exited the ballroom through the kitchen.

As he shook hands with various kitchen workers, a man approached him with a rolled-up campaign poster and, when he was only one foot away, pulled out a .22 revolver from within it and shot Kennedy three times. Two athletes who were accompanying Kennedy, Rafar Johnson and Roosevelt Grier, wrestled the shooter to the ground and disarmed him, but only after five bystanders had been injured. Kennedy was rushed to the Good Samaritan Hospital but there was nothing they could do and he died the next day, leaving behind a wife who was pregnant with their 11th child.

The man who had shot him was Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian immigrant who took issue with Bobby Kennedy’s support of Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. He was tried and sentenced to death in 1969, but California abolished the death penalty shortly afterwards and Sirhan remains incarcerated to this day.