Happy Black History Month
Izola Ware Curry (born 1916) is an African-American woman who attempted to assassinate civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. She stabbed King with a letter opener at a Harlem book signing on September 20, 1958, during the Harlem civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
King went on a tour to promote Strive Toward Freedom after it was was published. During a book signing at a department store in Harlem, a well-dressed woman approached and asked him if he was Martin Luther King, Jr. When King replied in the affirmative, she said, “I’ve been looking for you for five years,” then stabbed him in the chest with a steel letter opener.
New York City Police Department officers Al Howard and Phil Romano were in a radio car near the end of their tour at 3:30 pm when they received a report of a disturbance in Blumstein’s Department store. They arrived to see King sitting in a chair with an ivory handled letter opener protruding from his chest. Howard was heard to tell King, “Don’t sneeze, don’t even speak.”
Howard and Romano took King still in the chair down to an ambulance that took King to Harlem Hospital, which was already notifying chief of thoracic and vascular surgery John W. V. Cordice, Jr. who was in his office in Brooklyn, and trauma surgeon Emil Naclerio, who had been attending a wedding and arrived still in a tuxedo. They made incisions and inserted a rib spreader, making King’s aorta visible. Chief of Surgery Aubre de Lambert Maynard then entered and attempted to pull out the letter opener, but cut his glove on the blade; a surgical clamp was finally used to pull out the blade.
“Days later,” King wrote in his posthumously published autobiography, “when I was well enough to talk with Dr. Aubrey Maynard, the chief of the surgeons who performed the delicate, dangerous operation, I learned the reason for the long delay that preceded surgery. He told me that the razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it. ‘If you had sneezed during all those hours of waiting,’ Dr. Maynard said, ‘your aorta would have been punctured and you would have drowned in your own blood.”
While still in the hospital, King said in a September 30 press release in which he reaffirmed his belief in “the redemptive power of nonviolence” and issued a hopeful statement about his attacker, “I felt no ill will toward Mrs. Izola Currey [sic] and know that thoughtful people will do all in their power to see that she gets the help she apparently needs if she is to become a free and constructive member of society. On October 17, after hearing King’s testimony, a grand jury indicted Curry for attempted murder.[6] As a result of her indictment and subsequent hearings, she was adjudicated incompetent to stand trial and was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane.
Reportage recalling the event on the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2014, noted:
As it happened, one of the cops was black, the other white and the same was the case with the two surgeons. Each pair worked as true partners, proving that the color of their skin meant nothing and translating the content of their character into life-saving action.
thank you to Wikipedia for the info 😉
Tlj 