Volume 32 · Number 1 · Fall 2014
Freeborn Hall: Robert Kennedy
Robert Kennedy speaks at Freeborn Hall in May 1968. (Center for Sacramento History, Sacramento Bee Collection, Richard Gilmore, 1968)
(Center for Sacramento History, Sacramento Bee Collection, Richard Gilmore, 1968)
For many Aggies who attended UC Davis in the late 1960s, their most vivid Freeborn Hall memory was of a presidential campaign appearance by Robert F. Kennedy three weeks before his assassination.
Kennedy spoke to a packed house on May 16, 1968 — one of three visits he made to the Sacramento region before the June 4 California Democratic primary.
Barry Kerr ’71 was too young to vote then — the voting age at the time was 21 — but his fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, co-hosted Kennedy’s visit to campus.
“I got to go to the Sacramento airport to help pick him up and bring him to the campus,” Kerr said. “He was so charming, gracious and caring. I really enjoyed getting to meet this man who might have become president.
“He let me talk about when I was a sixth-grader and helped in my hometown of Grass Valley with his brother’s campaign in 1960. I remember he said to me, ‘It was people just like you who knew what a great man Jack [President John F. Kennedy] was, and who helped elect him.’ I told him how sorry I was his brother had been killed, and he again said to me, ‘I hope our family is finished with this kind of behavior from people.’”
After making his California primary victory speech, Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in the early hours of June 5, 1968. He died the next day.
Watch a video excerpt of his Freeborn Hall speech.
Other national politicians to appear there include Dick Cheney, who gave a January 1995 lecture between jobs as secretary of defense and vice president; and former President Bill Clinton, who stopped by to greet an overflow crowd who had heard his November 2002 Mondavi Center speech simulcast in Freeborn.
Back to "Freeborn Hall Retrospective"