That was the message given by the Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles when he spoke at the Multi-Cultural Luncheon held as the culmination of Harmony Week 2009, a month long celebration of diversity and heritage held by Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College.
SWVCTC President Joanne Jaeger Thomblin spoke to the Daily News before the program, and said she is proud of the effect Harmony Week has had on the college.
“We have increased minority enrollment at Southern as a result of our multicultural approach,” Thomblin said. “We are broadening the minds of Southern West Virginia and helping them learn to live in a multicultural world.”
The Savas-Kostas Theater in Logan was filled with students from several Mingo County schools, college students and others who wanted to hear Kyles speak.
Rev. Kyles was an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and is the last living person who was with Dr. King on a motel balcony April 4, 1968, in Memphis, when the civil rights leader was assassinated.
Kyle said he was born in Mississippi, but moved with his family to Chicago when he was young. However, when the Civil Rights movement began in the late 1950s, he was invited to be the pastor of a newly organized small church. Kyles said he felt compelled move back to the south and become part of something greater than himself.
“When I told my family I was going to move with my wife and three young children to Memphis, Tenn., they each asked if I was crazy. “Why would you go back down there, we are living in the Promised Land?’, the said. But then I asked my mother, and she said, ‘Go with God,’ and that’s what I did. We moved to Memphis in 1959.”
“From the cradle to the grave, in Memphis was segregated,” Kyles said.
He became part of the movement, being arrested for sitting in the front of a city bus, which was against the Jim Crow laws of the day.
Being part of the struggle against segregation involv-ed his entire family, Kyles said. He said his five year old daughter was one of 13 children who attended school when the schools were desegregated.
“The police came to my house and escorted us to the school,” Kyles said. “There was another group of policemen at the school to protect us from these angry hordes. But, the angry hordes never showed up. The only angry people who were there were the policemen themselves. They called me and my daughter filthy names.”
Kyles said Dr. King had come to Memphis in April of 1968 to help support garbage workers who were striking there. He said King’s ‘Over the mountaintop’ speech, the last time he spoke in public, almost never happened.
The speech is remarkable for the prophetic words spoken by Dr. King. “I have seen the promised land,” King said. “I may not get there with you, but we, as a people will get to the promised land.” King was assassinated the next day.
Kyles shared his experience.
“The weather was terrible, there were tornadoes, and Dr. King didn’t think anyone would be at the church. So a few of us went to the church, and it was nearly full,” Kyles said. So they called Dr. King, who came to the church to speak.
“Martin had received many death threats,” Kyles said. He spoke about those threats, Kyles said, and he seemed to be resigned to the fact of his own death.
“I have seen the Pro-mised Land,” King said.
“After he spoke, he seemed much better, as if he had preached himself out of it,” Kyles said. He said King and the others, who included Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, were to have dinner at Kyles’ newly purchased home.
“He was jovial, joking around,” Kyles said. “We left the motel room, Martin leaned over the balcony [to speak to someone], and I turned to tell him to hurry. Then, the shots rang out.”
Kyles said he went into the room to call the hotel operator for an ambulance. Ironically, the operator had heard the shots, and when she saw what had happened, had a heart attack on the scene.
“The police arrived, I took a spread from the bed and covered him. He never spoke a word. He went to the hospital. And waited. And waited,” he said. “And when the call came, they didn’t say Martin Luther King died, they said ‘we lost him, we lost him’.”
“I had no words forty years ago to express how I felt,” Kyles said. “I have no words forty years later.”
When Rev. Kyles looked for meaning in these tragic events, he said he realized his purpose was to be a witness.
“I was there, why? Why that moment in time? To be a witness, an eye witness must be true. Here was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, he could have been anything. But, he died helping garbage workers,”Kyles said.
“They said, ‘we will shoot this dreamer’, and they did,” Kyles said. “Yes, you can kill the dreamer, but you cannot kill the dream.”
“Don’t let your dreams die.”
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