LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WHAS11) -- "We've for some difficult days ahead, but it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop."
It was his last speech, delivered in Memphis one day before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
"I was there the night before and he was having a hard time not wanting to speak that night because, in fact, he felt something was going to happen," Rev. Charles Elliott said.
Elliott, now the pastor of King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church, was with King in Memphis to help support the Memphis Sanitation Strike. Elliott had worked alongside King helping to organize rallies and marches in their fight against segregation.
"I was there, so I'm one of those who know we've come a long way," he said. "I don't read about it. I was in it."
Elliott said much has changed over the past 50 years, a lot for the better, but there is still a long way to go before King's dream is realized.
"We may have come on a different ship getting over here, but today, we're on the same boat," he said. "And if that boat sinks, we all will sink."
"It's better for us to engage people along their life's journey, and I think it'll make the nation better," Kentucky State University President M. Christopher Brown II said. "The more people work, the more people have education, the lower our healthcare costs, the lower our imprisonment rates."
Brown, who was the speaker at the Simmons College MLK Remembrance Service held Wednesday afternoon at St. Stephen Baptist Church, said while King may have died 50 years ago, his legacy has remained along with his message of equality and love, which still rings true half a century later.
"My great hope for our country is that we will one day all be able to see the humanity in all of us," he said.
"Now we've got an opportunity to move from where we're at to where we need to go where the dream will become a reality," Elliott said. "The dreamer is dead, but you young people are keeping the dream alive."
►Contact reporter Dennis Ting at dting@whas11.com. Follow him on Twitter (@DennisJTing) and Facebook.