“I was close to Dr. (Martin Luther) King when that bullet struck him in the neck,” said the Rev. Samuel B. Kyles. “He laid there on the balcony bleeding from the large hole in his neck.”

After 40 years of recounting that story, students near and far continue to ask Rev. Kyles about his relationship with Dr. King and the last few hours they spent together before King was assassinated at 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968.

On April 3, Dr. King returned to Memphis to lead a peaceful march in support of the striking sanitation workers. The March 28 march had turned violent.

That morning, Dr. King and his entourage held a press conference about the strike at the Rev. Jim Lawson’s church. Then Dr. King met with his staff before his Mason Temple speech.

It was a busy day for the King entourage. But right before the rally at Mason Temple, the sky opened and torrential rains started thrashing the church.

“It was thundering and lightning, and there was a tornado watch,” Kyles remembered. “So Dr. King thought there wouldn’t be many at the church. So he told us to go ahead and have the meeting.”

Kyles said Dr. King preferred to stay put at the Lorraine to “catch up on the Poor People’s Campaign.” They took Dr. King’s advice – Kyles and the Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Andy Young – and left for Mason Temple.

Kyles said the people started clapping when the trio walked toward the pulpit. “With his preacher sense, Albernathy said, ‘These people ain’t clapping for us. They think Martin is coming behind us.’”

Albernathy got on a phone and urged Dr. King to speak to the capacity crowd.

“So he came,” said Kyles. “He preached himself through the fear of death that night. But we came that close to missing the ‘mountaintop’ speech.”

The following morning, Kyles recalled Dr. King being lighthearted and almost giddy. “He hadn’t felt that way since that (earlier) march broke up. He was feeling really good and had a pillow fight with Andy Young. They were having fun.

“We had meetings all day. A lot of the meetings were about the staff recommitting themselves to nonviolence,” said Kyles. “He (Dr. King) told us to embrace it and if you don’t embrace it as a philosophy, you must embrace it as a tactic.”

After a day’s work, Kyles instructed a few church members from Monumental Baptist to prepare dinner for Dr. King and his top lieutenants.
“I told him dinner would be served at my house at 5 o’clock,” he said. “But it was really at six because he was so slow.

“When I got to the room to collect Dr. King and Ralph, Dr. King said, ‘Oh, no. Dinner is not until six and I’m in no hurry. So have a seat.’”

Kyles said he waited in room 306 until Dr. King was ready. In the meantime, the three preachers talked candidly and joked with one another. “We talked preacher talked,” he said.

Kyles said Dr. King loved jokes.

“He talked affectionately about his parents. He said, ‘You know, Dad was tough.’ His mother’s father was pastor of Ebenezer. And when the church became vacant, Daddy King preached to become the pastor. And he did. Now check this out: Daddy came, got the church and got Mama too.’”

It was a quarter to six and the three preachers were ready for dinner. “We stepped out on the balcony together,” Kyles said. “Ralph was putting on shaving lotion.”

Moments later, a shot rang out. People in the Lorraine courtyard had ducked, Kyles said. Then he noticed Dr. King lying mortally wounded in a puddle of blood.

“I rushed to Martin,” he said. “There was so much blood. I ran in the room to call the ambulance. After the police arrived, I asked them if they’d call.

“I got a spread from the room and covered him from his neck down. I put a towel to his face to stop the bleeding. It was so much blood ... so much blood.”

‘He’s not coming to dinner’

It was a Kodak moment for Adjua Naantaanbu and her famous guests who had dinner at her home in Binghamton approximately 24 hours before one of them was fatally wounded by an assassin’s bullet.

But nobody thought to bring a camera to capture the once-in-a-lifetime experience for posterity.

Forty years later, Naantaanbu still remembers the dinner scene with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Dr. Ralph Abernathy munching on steak, baked potato and salad, and sipping cold ice tea.

Earlier that day on April 3, Naantaanbuu had picked up Dr. King, Dr. Abernathy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bernard Lee and a woman named Mrs. Cotton from the airport in her 1966 “duce and a quarter,” and drove them to the Lorraine Motel for lodging.

It took them so long to check in, said Naantaanbu, who wondered why Dr. King was given a room upstairs at the motel when several were available on the lower level.

“When they finished, I took them to Centenary Methodist Church on McLemore, where Rev. Jim Lawson was the pastor. They had a meeting there. Then I took them back to the Lorraine.”

Since Dr. King was in Memphis for the sanitation workers’ strike, Naantaanbuu said, Dr. King wanted to know what the daily newspaper had written about him.

“He asked me about The Commercial Appeal and talked about his involvement in the ‘movement.’ He said he tried to get out of it and couldn’t.”

Naantaanbu also said Dr. King talked about the time a busload of people came to his house to talk to him and he told his wife to tell them he wasn’t there.

“He said he was just tired. But the people said they’d wait. So he did talk to them,” she recalled. “He said the group told him that people in Mississippi were dying from malnutrition. And he told them he would take the issue to Washington, DC.”

Before Dr. King delivered his “Mountaintop” speech that night at Mason Temple, Naantaanbu said Dr. Abernathy had asked her to prepare dinner for the group. Later that evening, torrential rains started pelting the church and wouldn’t let up. “It was so much rain. I’d never seen that much rain in my life,” said Naantaanbuu.

After Dr. King’s chilling speech, she said Solomon Jones, an employee at R.S. Lewis Funeral Home, drove Dr. King and Dr. Abernathy to her home for late night dinner. She said they didn’t leave until the rain let up around 2 a.m. After the April 3 dinner, Naantaanbu said she was asked to prepare dinner again on April 4.

“They wanted chitterlings, spaghetti and slaw. I asked them what time they wanted to eat. They said 4 o’clock. So I started cooking around 2:30 that evening.

“At 4:30, they didn’t show up. So I called Bernard Lee. He said they were in a meeting and would be right over. I found out they were in a meeting with Jesse Epps and Bill Lucy, who had invited Dr. King to go to dinner.

“I was also told (Rev. Samuel) ‘Billy’ Kyles had invited them to dinner. Bernard Lee said he didn’t know Billy Kyles had fixed dinner for them. But he said they would drop the staff over to his house and then they would come to my house.”

The food was ready, Naantaanbu said. “I was sitting there with the table set.”

Then a girlfriend called and asked Naantaanbu if she had the TV on. “I told her I was sitting on the couch waiting for Dr. King to come to dinner. She said, ‘Girl, he’s not coming. He’s been assassinated.’”

In loving memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., let us all reflect on the principals that he lived and died for. It is not only right to reverence the memory of the blood that was shed so that we might have all of the rights and privileges we have today, but it is our responsibility to teach those principles to our young people so that the legacy can not only live on, but be appreciated.