By Linda S. Lawson 

 As the last living person to spend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final hour with him, Rev. Samuel Kyles has told the story to none more famous than Nelson Mandela.

   The former South African President was fixated with the last minutes of King’s life on earth. They visited the Lorraine Motel where Kyles shared the story as he has done with countless audiences throughout the world:

   It was early in the evening on April 3, 1965 when Kyles arrived at the now famous Memphis Hotel to pick up Dr. King. He invited King to Memphis to protest inhumane conditions of African-American sanitation workers. Kyles is the pastor of Monumental Baptist Church in Memphis, a position he’s served for 45 years.

   The two men spent about an hour talking “preacher talk” and having a lighthearted discussion.  They walked onto the balcony. Kyles took five steps. The fatal shot rang out.

  The bullet is called a “Dum Dum”, designed to explode on impact.

  It was so powerful that it mushroomed as it blew off a portion of King’s face, ripping out a part of his chest and severing his spinal cord, Kyle recalled.

   King never spoke another word.

   At that moment, two lives were lost. The switchboard operator and motel owner’s wife, so horrified by the reality of what she saw immediately collapsed, suffering a massive heart attack in the courtyard. She died four days later.

   When Mandela, a man imprisoned for twenty-seven years, hear the story, he wept. Tears for his hero.

   Throughout his life, Kyles wondered whey he, a man who also narrowly escaped being bombed, was the chosen one to recount for everyone from diplomats to paupers, the darkest day in Civil Rights History.

   He still cannot put into words what he felt the moment the bullet shattered Justice’s Drum Major.

    It haunted him. After years of wondering, Kyles eventually got his answer. He shared it with residents of East St. Louis at the Pilgrim Green Missionary Baptist Church on Monday.

   He opened with the story of famed writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a sickly man who as a child entertained himself by watching an elderly man climb poles and turn on lights. When asked what he was doing, the child responded, “I’m watching a man punch holes in the darkness.”

   Kyles knows he is a witness of light, a man punching holes in the darkness, encouraging those born of African –American ancestry to do the same.

   “We need to knock holes in the darkness of ignorance. We need to know who we are and whose we are.”

   Despite the horrendous account of King’s death. Kyles didn’t leave the audience to wallow in the nightmare of that April day in 1968.  Instead, Kyles shined light on the strength of miracles and of whence African-Americans came.

  “If our young people only had a sense of who we are. We weren’t always slaves. We were kings and queens. We weren’t slaves, we were enslaved,” Kyles said.

   “In less than 150 years, we have gone from not being able to read to the Secretary of State of the world’s most powerful nation, born In Birmingham, Alabama, being a black woman.”

   He spoke to how African-Americans, derived from the strongest of the strong, having bore the genes of those fortunate to make it across the water.

   “We survived everything put upon us. Everything,” he said.

   “Everything that crooked mind thought, we survived. Only five of twenty survived the Middle Passage. It took a strong people to survive it and to thrive in it. Our ancestors were so wise. You were put here. Don’t know the language and have to survive. Then at the end of slavery, you are told you can go. Go where and do what? We owe it to our ancestors to knock the holes out of darkness.”

   Kyles specifically wanted to debunk the myth that African-Americans are unmotivated and without ambition.

   “We have even bought into that we are lazy and shiftless. How can we be shiftless and lazy when we did all the work and whites sat under the trees? They stopped hauling gold and started hauling slaves because it was so profitable. We worked all those years and didn’t get paid. We have to keep knocking holes in the dark of our ignorance,” he said.

   Kyles holds hope for the future. African-Americans will thrive, he said, despite whatever trials they might face today and took a swipe at the current Bush administration.

   “We survived one Bush. We’ll survive another one,” he quipped.

   He held hope in generations of African-Americans who now hold ever profession under the rainbow, a feat unthinkable to slaves.

   “Can you imagine it was illegal to read?  They could do anything to us. Lynch us. Burn us at the stake, but you better not teach them to read. Now, we have doctors, lawyers, journalists, brain surgeons and names I can’t even pronounce. What a Mighty God we serve,” he said.

   The mission on that fateful day in 1968 he says he will continue to share until his dying breath, teaching everyone that in a battle between the light of knowledge and the darkness of ignorance and evil, light will always prevail.

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