INDIANAPOLIS – Hundreds of people paid tribute Friday to the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as they marked the 40th anniversary of his death and a passionate speech by Robert Kennedy credited with helping quell violence in Indianapolis after King’s assassination.

“I think he would be shocked to realize today, 40 years later, that we are still addressing the problems he confronted when he was alive,” Indianapolis NAACP president Cornell Burris said of King. “Discrimination is very much alive.”

The event in a downtown school began with musical performances by a city youth group that promotes social justice and nonviolence. Dozens of exhibits on King filled the halls.

Ethel Kennedy, Kennedy’s widow, and her son Max were scheduled to speak before visiting the site adjacent to the school where Robert Kennedy spoke on April 4, 1968.

Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana for the Democratic presidential nomination that night when he learned King had been cut down by a rifle slug as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis hotel.

He announced the civil rights leader’s death to the crowd and urged the shocked audience, most of whom were black, not to answer violence with violence, even though he said it would be natural to be filled with “bitterness, and with hatred and a desire for revenge.”

“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love,” he told the crowd.

Many believe Kennedy’s speech helped the city avoid the violence that erupted in many other communities after King’s death.

“The words and the presentation of Robert Kennedy were a tremendous source of comfort to those who heard them,” Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who was the city’s mayor at the time, said in a telephone interview Friday. “I’m certain it had very, very constructive results with a much larger group of people, not only in Indianapolis but also around the country.”

State Sen. Teresa Lubbers, an Indianapolis Republican, was a junior in high school and one of a handful of whites in the crowd for Kennedy’s speech.

She said Kennedy spoke from the heart and calmed the crowd.

“I didn’t have any sense that the crowd would erupt,” Lubbers said. “I had no sense of being out of place and it didn’t leave in my mind that I was in danger in any way.”

In May 1994, President Bill Clinton and members of the King and Kennedy families attended the groundbreaking for the monument at the site where Kennedy spoke. The monument is made of steel from melted guns and features a statue of King and Kennedy reaching out to each other, along with a stone engraved with Kennedy’s speech.