Leadership Quote by Louis Stokes

A blunt little indictment hides inside that almost offhand observation: assassinations aren’t just political events, they’re public entertainment. Louis Stokes, a career politician who spent decades watching media cycles harden into spectacle, frames the problem as a collective appetite, not a lone killer’s pathology. “People” is doing the heavy lifting here. It spreads responsibility outward, away from the assassin and toward the culture that can’t look away.

The line works because it’s both descriptive and accusatory without sounding sanctimonious. “Fascinated” is a polite word for something uglier: craving, voyeurism, the thrill of watching history snap. It acknowledges that an assassination delivers narrative in its most addictive form - a clear villain (or supposed villain), a sudden rupture, a before-and-after that reorganizes memory. Politics, usually slow and procedural, becomes instantly legible when it’s reduced to a body and a gun.

Stokes’ context matters. As a member of Congress and a prominent Black public figure, he lived in a country where political violence wasn’t abstract; it was an ever-present threat, amplified by the long shadow of the Kennedy and King assassinations and the conspiracy-industrial complex that followed. His remark also reads like a warning about incentives: the more fascinated the public becomes, the more the media packages violence as destiny, and the more would-be attackers can imagine themselves as authors of history.

It’s a sober line, but not neutral. It asks whether our attention is complicity.