The woman who almost killed Martin Luther King

[friedo]

TSG has a pretty interesting article about now-98-year-old Izola Curry, who stabbed MLK with a letter opener in 1958. She was committed and everybody pretty much forgot about her, until they tracked her down to a nursing home in Queens.

[aceplace57]

Its disturbing to imagine a civil rights movement with Dr King. I have a bad feeling it would have been quite violent and would have torn this country apart. Dr King’s belief in non violent protest and using the courts to force change was essential. Thurgood Marshall and Dr King made such a powerful team. Marshall battled in court to get permits to march and hold local police accountable to protect those marchers. It kept much of the violence away.

In the decade between King’s stabbing and his assassination, the civil rights leader would often recall the Harlem attack, noting how close he came to dying that Saturday afternoon in Blumstein’s department store. In fact, during the “Promised Land” speech King delivered in Memphis the day before he was murdered, he referred to Curry.

“You know, several years ago, I was in New York City autographing the first book that I had written. And while sitting there autographing books, a demented black woman came up,” King told the Mason Temple audience. “Before I knew it, I had been stabbed by this demented woman. I was rushed to Harlem Hospital. It was a dark Saturday afternoon. That blade had gone through, and the X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery. And once that’s punctured, you drowned in your own blood, that’s the end of you." King added, “It came out in The New York Times the next morning that if I had merely sneezed, I would have died.”

As he closed the final address of his life, King remarked that, had he sneezed, he would have missed a decade’s worth of milestone events, including passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Selma marches, the Freedom Riders protests, and the March on Washington, where King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Reflecting on what might not ever have been, King said, “I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”

[aceplace57]

make that…Its disturbing to imagine a civil rights movement **without **Dr King.

Edit time out screwed me.

[FriarTed]

An episode of history that I had no idea whatsoever about.

[Ravenman]

Huh. I was just at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis not too long ago, and don’t recall seeing a single word about that attack.

[friedo]

@FriarTed

An episode of history that I had no idea whatsoever about.

Nor I. I love learning little bits of history like this.

[Shodan]

I read about this a month or so back. There is a rather graphic picture, to which I won’t link because I can’t figure out the noparse thing.

Regards,
Shodan

[JoseB]

@Shodan

I read about this a month or so back. There is a rather graphic picture, to which I won’t link because I can’t figure out the noparse thing.

Regards,
Shodan

You could put the link inside a “spoiler” tag, so that you would still comply with the “two click” rule, adding a warning text in the message body saying something like “caution: link to a very graphic and disturbing image within the spoiler”, or something.

Call me morbid but you’ve piqued my interest about that particular photo

(And being the son of a doctor and a nurse who had read his father’s library of medical books by age 14, I probably -probably- wouldn’t be grossed out)