How one man's life was changed by mere kindness near St. Lawrence, NL - and the power of his story.

The line began at the doors to the theatre in The Rooms, snaking along the glass wall in the building before coiling back around on itself again. Hundreds were here on a cold winter evening for one reason - to hear a story of courage, a story of love, a story of how small things can change lives in big ways. There were so many people to hear the story that the auditorium could not contain them all. There would be two separate sittings, two separate tellings of the story.

After the people had filed in and taken their seats, an 83-year-old African-American man entered and stood in the well of the room.

He began to speak, recalling a winter evening 64 years earlier a couple hundred miles away - in a little town called St. Lawrence, on Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula. "The lesson that I learned, that I was taught, was that love and humanity could do such great things," he said.

Lanier Phillips gestured at the audience - many of whom had driven four hours to St. John's just to see him.

"I look at my sisters and brothers in this front row here, I feel so proud…

"Today, I have no hatred in my heart. I hate no one. And I give the credit to the people of St. Lawrence, what they taught me."

Lanier Phillips grew up far away from the rocky shores of Newfoundland. He was born in 1923 in the rural American South, Georgia, in a little country town named Lithonia. It was a time when racism was at its angry apex. The Ku Klux Klan ran everything, he says. The policeman: Klan. The store owner: Klan. "In fact, all the white people were Klan as far as I knew, they all were Klan, and they all were racists - utmost racists," Phillips says. There were whippings and beatings. In his late teens, as the Second World War spread into a global conflict, Phillips joined the United States Navy. Maybe it would be different there, he thought.

It wasn't.

Segregation ruled. Blacks could serve only as mess attendants. They were shoved into a corner to eat, separated from whites by a canvas sheet. When Phillips, then 18, sailed to Iceland on his first voyage aboard the USS Truxtun - a destroyer that escorted other ships and patrolled the north Atlantic - the blacks aboard were barred from leaving the vessel when it docked. The Americans had made a pact with their hosts: no "Negroes" would set foot on Icelandic soil.

That would be strong in Phillips' mind as the Truxtun heaved and crashed through the north Atlantic waves on his second voyage soon after, in February 1942. As the ship ran aground, grinding to a sudden halt, he was thrown from his bunk down onto the other mess attendants. One of his first thoughts was that an enemy vessel had torpedoed them. He grabbed a pair of shoes, put them on and ran topside. It was still dark. He could hear the steel cracking, the propellers grinding against the rocks. The boat's searchlight illuminated the landscape. "All I could see was snow and ice, the cliffs," he recalls.

Waves slammed the ship against the rocks. As daylight came and chaos continued he could see the water was thick with oil. Sailors were hurled through the air like rag dolls. Some were dashed against the rocks; others scrambled to safety.

Phillips got into the last life raft, telling his black comrades they would die if they didn't follow. They wouldn't come aboard, petrified they were off Iceland, worried about the lynchings that would surely come. And so they died. But Phillips decided to take his chances.

The raft agonizingly crept toward shore through bitter winter conditions, then capsized. Phillips made it to land, but thought that was it. Then somebody picked him up and said, You'll die if you lie there. "I looked at him, and I saw his white face," Phillips says. "I knew he wasn't an American. I knew he wasn't a sailor. And the accent…"

Memories are fragmented. Up the sheer cliff... onto a pony-driven sleigh. A large blank space. Suddenly awake, conscious on a table. Naked. Sailors covered in oil, black as an outport midnight.

A woman massaging the life back into his cold skin. The first thing he heard her say as she bathed him: This is the curliest hair I've ever seen. "I thought, this is the end of me - they're going to know I'm black." He thought he had survived the shipwreck only to be lynched after all.

The woman, Violet Pike, continued to work at cleaning the oil from his skin. It came off the others; why not this sailor? "I spoke up then. I thought, I might as well let them know and get it over with. I said it's the colour of my skin; I'm a Negro … You can't get it off."

Nonplussed, Pike just kept bathing him. There were kind words. Longjohns for underwear... a bed to rest in for the night. She stayed by his bedside all night, feeding him, tending to him. "I didn't think white people existed with that kind of humane treatment - they could treat a black man like that," Phillips says.

A simple navigational error grounded the Truxtun and the provisions ship she was escorting, the USS Pollux, that night. A small thing, a big impact: some 203 men died on the rocks and in the water. Many who tried to swim ashore were overcome by the fierce winter weather - and oil. Another 186 men survived, thanks to the men and women of Lawn and neighbouring St. Lawrence. The rescuers, many from a nearby mine, rappelled down the sheer cliffs and transported the survivors to safety. They stood sentinel over them, nursing life back into their cold bodies, providing soup and shelter. The next morning, the Navy - then with a base at Argentia, NL - came to get them. Phillips joined the line with the rest of the survivors. The white survivors. Not you, the petty officer said. Phillips ended up back with mess attendants - the other blacks - aboard a ship for the next five days. "I knew then - boy, back in Georgia again." Time passed. And as time passed, times changed. Phillips stayed in the Navy. He got married and raised a family. Opportunities slowly became available for blacks, and Phillips progressed up the ranks to first-class steward. But his repeated requests for something different, something more, fell on deaf ears.

Finally, he went outside the chain of command, and wrote to Charles Diggs, a black US Representative from Michigan, and the Bureau of Naval Personnel. The orders came back: report to fleet sonar school. He hadn't asked for sonar school; he wanted any technical training. But sonar school would do just fine.

Phillips wasn't there yet: the captain called him with an offer to become his personal steward instead. Phillips wouldn't back down. He held firm, and he went to school. In 1957, he became a sonar supervisor. He also taught anti-submarine warfare before retiring in 1961. Yet he didn't stop working. Jacques Cousteau wanted an improved underwater lamp. Engineers drew it up; Phillips assembled the prototypes. The lamps were named calypso lamps, after the famous voyager's ship.

But perhaps his greatest role was yet to come: he would be the teller of the story.

In the mid-1950s, Lanier Phillips met Martin Luther King. Boston was home port for Phillips; King received his doctorate from Boston University.

One Sunday, Phillips went to services at Boston's Warren Street Baptist Church. King preached that day. "I thought it was just fantastic; I got to shake his hand," Phillips recalls.

Years passed. King fought the good fight for civil rights in the South. Phillips worked to break down barriers of his own.

One day in 1965, Phillips saw the news about the marches that would cement the civil rights movement in the national consciousness. Images of police officers assaulting peaceful protesters in Selma, Alabama, drove him to action.

"I said, 'Gee, those people are just like the survivors of the Truxtun, they need help,'" he recalls. "I told my wife and kids - I'm going to Selma. I've got to go to Selma." He was there at Brown Chapel; the Dallas County courthouse; the subsequent march to Montgomery. He can still remember King's words: If a man hasn't discovered something he would die for, he isn't fit to live. "That's the way I felt," Phillips says. "I had no fear; I had no fear at all… I was willing - the same as those people of St. Lawrence, who came down those ropes and went out into that water and pulled bodies in, even the dead bodies they rescued and buried. It's just the humanity and the love that I got from St. Lawrence."

The march became a defining moment for the country. Months later, the Voting Rights Act became law. Another wall came tumbling down. And Phillips was there in the middle of it.

Many years passed before Lanier Phillips knew the name of the town where his life had forever changed. In 1979 Newfoundland author Cassie Brown wrote the seminal book on the tragedy, Standing Into Danger. Phillips heard about it, and struck up a correspondence with Brown.

In 1988, he saw a notice about a Truxtun reunion in a veterans' magazine.

That's when he began telling his story. He first told it in his Gulfport, Mississippi, retirement home. Then phone calls flooded in, request after request, to share his story with writers and reporters, with school children, with fellow veterans.

He returned to Newfoundland that year - for the first time since its people changed his life.

Phillips has since moved to an Armed Forces retirement home in Washington, DC - a rolling green oasis in the middle of asphalt and concrete. There are plaques and certificates of appreciation on a wall of his small room. They thank him for telling the story. One, from the Baha'i Faith, lauds his "commitment to race unity."  He does not get weary of telling the tale.

"I'll tell it again and again," he says. "I'll tell it until the day I die, because I think it should be told. To me, it's a lesson in humanity and love for mankind, and I hope the whole world hears about it. I just wish other people would experience the same love."

Back in St. John's, the people who came to hear the story have gathered around Lanier Phillips, thanking him. Some are relatives and descendants of those he met more than six decades earlier.

Today, there's a playground in St. Lawrence named after him. It was his gift to the townspeople in return for the gift they gave him. Big changes, small things.

The words he spoke minutes earlier continue to reverberate through the hall. "Now Dr. King said when a black child is subjected to racism and discrimination, he's wounded in mind and soul… I know, because I was wounded as a child.

"But I was healed in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland… I speak about it every chance I get."