In early 1968, the Rev. Samuel
Billy Kyles and another local minister beckoned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis to
demonstrate support for a strike by 1,300 black city sanitation workers. The
strikers were demanding a minimum 10-cents-an-hour wage increase, workplace
safeguards and dignity. Their placards proclaimed, “I Am a Man.”
Dr. King was reluctant at first; he
was preoccupied with his Poor People’s Campaign. But he came to see that the
Memphis strike converged with his national agenda for economic equality and
social justice, so he accepted.
After Dr. King arrived, Mr. Kyles
invited him to a home-cooked soul food dinner. Aware that Dr. King was
perennially tardy, Mr. Kyles promised to pick him up promptly at 5 p.m. at the
black-run Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was staying, in Room 306. The date was
April 4.
But when Dr. King later phoned the
Kyles home to confirm the invitation, he learned that the dinner would actually
be at 6. So when Mr. Kyles arrived around 5, Dr. King procrastinated.
He and a lieutenant, the Rev. Ralph
David Abernathy, remained in the room with Mr. Kyles and enjoyed almost an hour
of what Mr. Kyles later described as “preacher talk.”
Before they left, Mr. Kyles picked
out a necktie for Dr. King to wear to dinner.
When they finally emerged from the
room, on a second-floor balcony, Dr. King was gunned down by a sniper from
across the street.
Mr. Kyles died on Tuesday, at 81,
in a Memphis hospital. He was the last surviving witness to that motel-room
conversation (Mr. Abernathy died in 1990) and, from the
balcony, to Dr. King’s assassination.
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“A lot of people claimed to have
been on the balcony when Dr. King was shot down,” Mr. Kyles said.
Why had he been there? He often
asked himself that question, he said.
“Over the years, God revealed to me
why I was there,” he said. “Crucifixions have to have witnesses.”
Mr. Kyles vividly recalled that
evening in the documentary film “The
Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306,” which was nominated for an
Oscar in 2009, and in an interview for a publication put out by the Funders’
Network, a group of grant makers.
He remembered emerging from the
room with Dr. King at about 5:45. Hoping to keep the 6 p.m. dinner appointment,
Mr. Kyles was trying to hurry him to a white Cadillac, borrowed from a local
funeral home, that was waiting for them in the courtyard below.
“You’re not dressed for dinner,”
Dr. King yelled down to another aide, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. From the
courtyard Mr. Jackson introduced Dr. King to Ben Branch, a local bandleader.
(Andrew Young and Hosea Williams were also part of the entourage.)
Dr. King was talking to Mr. Branch
over the balcony railing when a single rifle shot — “kuh-PIE-yah!” was how Mr.
Kyles described the sound — reverberated from across the street.
“I thought I was having a
nightmare, but the nightmare was that I was awake,” Mr. Kyle said. “And then we
looked, and there was blood. So much blood.”
Mr. Kyles dashed back into the room
to summon an ambulance, but the motel’s telephone operator, alarmed by the
shooting, had left her switchboard and run outside. The woman, who was the
motel owner’s wife, had a heart attack in the courtyard and died a few days
later.
Mr. Kyles covered Dr. King’s body
with a bedspread, up to the knot of the necktie he had chosen. He instinctively
removed a crushed Salem cigarette, mindful that Dr. King had been
self-conscious about smoking and worried that young people might discover his
vice.
Dr. King’s murder shocked the
world, provoked riots in many of the nation’s cities and devastated Memphis
emotionally. It also galvanized the sanitation workers and their supporters. On
April 8, tens of thousands of demonstrators silently marched to honor Dr.
King’s memory.
A week later, the city agreed to
certify the union, safeguard sanitation workers and guarantee higher pay.
That May, caravans of protesters
converged on Washington for Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign for economic
justice.
“That’s where the witness comes
in,” Mr. Kyles said. “Yes, you can kill the dreamer. Absolutely, you can kill
the dreamer. But you cannot kill the dream.”
Mr. Kyles was born in Shelby,
Miss., a Delta town, on Sept. 26, 1934, to the Rev. Joseph Henry Kyles and the
former Ludie Cameron. He was named for the prophet Samuel, but after his mother
saw him baptizing neighborhood pets and memorializing dead birds, she began
calling him Billy, after the evangelist Billy Sunday.
The family moved to Chicago when he
was 6, and he attended Northern Seminary. He started preaching when he was 17
and singing even before that. (Aretha Franklin once said that her version of
the gospel song “Never Grow Old” was inspired by Mr. Kyles’s.)
When he decided to return to the
South, his brothers scoffed.
“You’re in the promised land,” he
recalled them saying.
“Here you are going back to Egypt,
to Memphis.”
He settled in Memphis, a segregated
city, in 1959 and became the founding pastor of Monumental Baptist Church. In
perhaps a foreshadowing of Dr. King’s visit in 1968, he met with the civil
rights leader Medgar Evers five years earlier at Evers’s Mississippi home
shortly before Evers was murdered in his front yard.
Mr. Kyles became a central figure
in Memphis’s struggle for civil rights. In 1961, his daughter Dwania was one of
13 black first graders to integrate Memphis public schools. “We did not want to
make the mistake that Little Rock had made and send high schoolers,” he said,
referring to the hostile reaction to a similar integration effort in Arkansas
in 1957 that compelled President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send in federal troops
.
He was later arrested for refusing
to sit in the back of a segregated city bus. Faced with the threat of a bus
boycott, the city desegregated its buses in 1964.
Mr. Kyles was instrumental in the
largely peaceful integration of restaurants and other public places in Memphis
and the elimination of a system of runoff elections, which impeded minority
candidates. (Eliminating the runoff helped elect the city’s first black mayor,
Willie W. Herenton, in 1991.) He also formed a chapter of Mr. Jackson’s civil
rights organization Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) and was
later a board member of the National Civil Rights Museum, established at the
site of Dr. King’s assassination.
“He was a founding father of the
New Memphis and the New South,” Mr. Jackson said at a tribute to Mr. Kyles this
month at the church he led for 55 years until he retired in 2014.
In addition to his wife, the former
Aurelia Kennedy, who confirmed his death, Mr. Kyles is survived by their
daughter, Epernay; four children from a previous marriage, to the former
Gwendolyn Hart — his daughters Dwania and Drusheena and sons Dwain and Devin —
and five grandchildren.
Mr. Kyles recalled that Dr. King,
during his final hours in Memphis, had left a deep impression.
The night before his assassination,
at a local church, Dr. King delivered his ringing “I’ve been to the mountaintop”
speech, in which he expressed premonitions of his death.
“I’ve seen the Promised Land,” he
said. “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as
a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Dr. King had predicted that he
would not live past 40. When he died the next evening, he was 39.
“I look at Martin’s picture, and
he’s the only one who didn’t get old,” Mr. Kyles said. “But what a price to pay
for not getting old.”
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