Kennedy's speech was raw and unpolished. He quoted Aeschylus from memory. He revealed publicly for the first time that his own brother had been killed by a white man, drawing a direct parallel to King's assassination. He urged the crowd not to give in to hatred or bitterness, but to pursue compassion and justice. The speech lasted barely five minutes. There was no violence in Indianapolis that night. Whether Kennedy's words alone prevented a riot is debatable, but the correlation between his presence and the city's calm became central to Indianapolis's civic identity. Kennedy himself would be assassinated two months later, on June 5, 1968, leaving the corner of 17th and Broadway as the site of one of his final, most consequential public moments.

The idea to memorialize that night came from Indiana Democratic politician Larry Allyn Conrad, who discussed it with Steve Mannheimer, an Indianapolis Star art critic and Herron School of Art professor. Conrad was connected to Herbert A. Simon, whose wife Diane had worked on Kennedy's campaign. The project languished until 1994, when Donnie Walsh, president of the Indiana Pacers, launched the Pacers Foundation and chose a Kennedy-King memorial as its inaugural project. A national design competition drew over 50 entries. The jury, which included the director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and a Howard University architecture professor, selected the proposal of Greg Perry, a 33-year-old artist from Franklin, Indiana.

Perry's design is arresting in its simplicity. Two half-figures, one of King and one of Kennedy, emerge from solid steel walls that flank a central pathway. The figures reach toward each other across the gap. During construction, the design was refined: the walls were shortened and pierced with silhouette cutouts shaped like shadows the figures might cast. The openings were drawn in chalk by Mannheimer directly onto the steel, then laser-cut. The bronze portraits were sculpted by Indianapolis artist Daniel Edwards. Near the spot where Kennedy actually spoke, a marker incorporates remnants of confiscated guns collected through an Indianapolis police amnesty program created in partnership with the Pacers. The total cost of the memorial approached $200,000, with the city contributing an additional $350,000 to redesign the southern half of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Park.

The memorial's groundbreaking on May 14, 1994, drew President Bill Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's widow Ethel Kennedy, and two of King's sons, Dexter Scott King and Martin Luther King III. The unveiling on September 30, 1995, attracted nearly 3,000 people. One of the memorial's bronze plaques contains the full text of Kennedy's Indianapolis speech, portions of which were later inscribed on his own memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. On April 4, 2018, exactly fifty years after King's assassination and Kennedy's speech, President Donald Trump signed the Kennedy-King National Commemorative Site Act, designating the memorial as a national commemorative site.

The Landmark for Peace stands in the park on Indianapolis's north side, two bronze figures perpetually extending toward each other across an open pathway. It is a memorial to two men who were both killed within months of each other in 1968. But it is also a memorial to a single evening when words spoken from a flatbed truck may have changed the course of a city. In 2009, a $3 million expansion was planned to add an eternal flame, an amphitheater seating up to 200 people, and elliptical walkways that abruptly end to symbolize the sudden end of both lives. The memorial asks visitors to consider what reconciliation looks like, physically rendered in steel and bronze: two figures who cannot touch, but who never stop reaching.