REVEREND Samuel Billy Kyles, a noted civil-rights leader who was with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr on a Memphis motel balcony when King was killed 48 years ago, died on Tuesday, April 26 2016.
He was 81.
Kyles had been ill for the past couple of years.
In October 2014, his deteriorating health led him to resign his leadership of Monumental Baptist Church after 55 years.
The church held a ceremony to honour Kyles earlier this month, but he was unable to attend.
Born in Shelby, Mississippi, in 1934, Kyles and his family moved to Chicago when he was six years old.
He came to Memphis in 1959 to become pastor of Monumental, which had just formed.
Kyles soon became active in the civil rights struggles facing the city.
Kyles helped bring King Jr to Memphis on behalf of the striking sanitation workers.
In 1968, Kyles helped form and lead an effort to gain community support for striking sanitation workers.
After Memphis workers went on strike in February, protesting low wages and inhumane working conditions, the group looked to King Jr to rally support and lead the workers’ march.
When the first march ended in violence, King Jr decided there would be another peaceful march.
Kyles, along with other Memphis ministers who had been organising nightly rallies and raising money for the strike, planned a major rally to prepare for another big march.
The rally was held at the Mason Temple on April 3 1968.
It was at this meeting that King Jr gave his now famous ‘mountaintop’ speech, foreshadowing his own assassination.
The following day, Kyles was to host King Jr to dinner at his home.
Kyles went to the Lorraine Motel to pick up his dinner guest at 5pm.
There, Kyles talked with Ralph Abernathy and King Jr for an hour before leaving the motel for dinner at 6pm.
As the two were leaving the motel, King Jr was assassinated.
Kyles and Abernathy spent the last hour of King Jr’s life with him in his hotel room.
When Abernathy passed away in 1990, Kyles became the only living person to have been with King Jr during the last hour of his life.
Kyles was the subject of the short film The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 2008.
The following year, when the Dalai Lama visited Memphis, Kyles stood on the balcony again, along with Dr Benjamin Hooks.
The Dalai Lama was moved when he learned he was standing where King Jr had been struck down and blessed the site.
Kyles formed the Memphis chapter of the Rev Jesse Jackson’s ‘Operation Push’ in 1974, the first chapter outside of Chicago.
In 2011, Kyles was honoured with a Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum.
Kyles’ passing, in a way, invokes discourse as to how different today’s African America society has become from that lived by those of the civil rights movement.
Are leaders in the community doing all they can to ensure the cause of the black child is heard?
While movements like Black Lives Matter have made significant inroads, the question is: How many black folk rally to the call of bettering their communities when there is no white-on-black injustice that has taken place?
Not many.
Community dialogue is lacking in tackling issues to do with race, equality and justice among black folk.
Seventeen months after a Cleveland police officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice and five months after a grand jury declined to indict that officer, the city of Cleveland will pay US$6 million to Rice’s family to settle a civil lawsuit.
In a settlement announced on Monday April 25 2016, the city will pay US$3 million each this year and in 2017.
The lion’s share, US$5,5 million, goes to Rice’s estate.
His mother and sister will receive another US$250 000 apiece.
The settlement, under which the city admits no wrongdoing, forecloses a painful and acrimonious litigation process that could have stretched for years.
It also means there will be no answers to some of the questions the civil lawsuit sought to address, including whether dispatchers passed along adequate information to officers and whether the department erred in hiring officer Timothy Loehmann, who fired the fatal shots.
Dispatchers failed to communicate to the cops that the caller said that the gun was a toy or ‘probably fake’ and that Rice was most likely a ‘juvenile’.
Loehmann shot Rice within seconds of arriving at the scene.
The family of Laquan McDonald, an unarmed man killed by a Chicago police officer, received US$5 million.
The family of Freddie Gray, who was mortally injured while riding in a Baltimore police van just over a year ago, received US$6,4 million.
The size of the settlement may reflect, in part, the circumstances of Rice’s death.
The video of an unarmed black boy being gunned down by police just seconds after they arrived on the scene sparked national horror.
Commenting on the US$6 million payout, Steve Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association, says Rice’s family should use the money to educate children about the danger of playing with toy guns.
Of course, he failed to realise that it is not a crime to play with a toy gun.
In fact, toy guns are a billion-dollar industry.
I guess they are only a threat when in the hands of black children.