When a would-be assassin nearly killed MLK in 1958

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was only 39 years old when an assassin ended his life on April 4, 1968. Few recall that King had received many previous threats on his life throughout his rise to leadership in the American civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Usually delivered by mail or phone, most attempts were anonymous and posed no imminent danger. Others were more ominous.

One group of white racists placed a $100,000 bounty on King’s head. Another group threw a bomb on the Kings’ family porch; luckily it did not detonate.

In another instance, King was the guest of a white family that lived along a strictly segregated beach in Florida. Scores of bullets were fired into the house, shattering windows and leaving bullet holes everywhere. Fortunately, no one was home at the time.

While potentially fatal, these events paled in comparison to what transpired on Sept. 20, 1958.

The Rev. King had arrived at Blumstein’s department store in Harlem, N.Y., at 2 p.m. that Saturday afternoon. Having just written his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom,” he was scheduled for a two-hour book signing. A long line awaited his arrival.

About an hour after the event began, 42-year-old Izola Ware Curry pushed to the front of the line and demanded to know, “Are you Martin Luther King?”

When King replied, “I am,” the Black woman from Adrian, Georgia, drew a 7-inch pearl-handled steel letter opener from her pocket and attacked. As the weapon entered King’s chest, Curry yelled, “I have to do it. I have to do it.”

Curry fled out the store’s front door and was about to enter a cab when the police apprehended her and took her into custody. The attacker protested, screaming to King, “You made enough people suffer the last six years. I was finally able to get to him now.”

Back in the store, a well-meaning bystander attempted to remove the letter opener protruding from King’s chest. Only quick action by two policemen prevented this foolish act, which may well have opened the wound and caused the victim to bleed out within minutes.

Instead, the two police officers carefully carried King out the store’s back door to avoid the panicking crowd and prevent any jarring movement that could cause irreparable damage.

An ambulance rushed King to Harlem Hospital, where a team of surgeons worked for nearly three hours to safely extract the letter opener and save King’s life.

Curry’s weapon had just missed penetrating King’s aorta. Any closer and the wound would have been fatal. As the New York Times reported, King would have died if he had done so much as sneeze.

Eager for news about King’s condition, a crowd gathered outside Harlem Hospital. As many as 18,000 get-well cards arrived, including one from President Dwight Eisenhower and another from Vice President Richard Nixon.

Questioned by police, Curry insisted that she had tried to kill King because she considered him a threat to herself and all other Black Americans. She claimed that King’s efforts to integrate society had somehow cost her jobs as a housekeeper. She also insisted that King and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) were Communists.

The police found a loaded .22 caliber automatic weapon hidden in Curry’s clothing, evidence that if she had been unable to kill King with her letter opener, she would have resorted to shooting him with the gun she had purchased in a Florida pawn shop.

Incredibly, a group of white supremacists from Caterville, Ga., mailed a “substantial sum” of money to help with Curry’s defense. They hoped that fellow racists would collect and send more cash soon.

Authorities had Curry transported to Bellview Hospital for psychological evaluation. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, she was deemed incapable of standing trial. Living out most of her life in a state hospital for the criminally insane, she died at the age of 98 in 2015.

King recovered and left Harlem Hospital a few weeks after he was assaulted. He never forgot the near-fatal episode nor his deranged attacker.

Returning to his home in Montgomery, Ala., King wrote, “I bear no bitterness toward her ... We want her to receive the necessary treatment so that she may become a constructive citizen in an integrated society.”

The scar left by the puncture wound in King’s chest was a constant reminder of his near-death experience. Every morning as he washed and prepared for the day, he saw the scar and was grateful that he had miraculously survived, allowing him to work for Black civil rights yet another day.

On April 3, 1968, King referred to the 1958 assassination attempt in his speech, “Promised Land,” delivered in Memphis, Tenn. He drew a laugh from his audience when he kiddingly quoted the New York Times as saying that a mere sneeze would have killed him a decade earlier.

On the following evening, as King stood outside his motel room in Memphis, James Earl Ray fired a long-range rifle that killed the charismatic civil rights leader. Ironically, a sudden sneeze could have caused King to move ever so slightly, perhaps evading the single bullet that took his life.

King had always stressed that the struggle for equal rights must go on even if he were murdered. The movement continued, although we will never know how much more Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could have achieved to help his country and his greater cause if he had somehow survived James Earl Ray’s attack, just as he had survived Izola Ware Curry’s vicious assault ten years earlier.

(The 31th annual celebration and remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. community solidarity and candlelight vigil will be held at 6 p.m., Monday, Jan. 20, at the Belen Public Library. The event is sponsored by the city of Belen’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Multicultural Commission. Please remember and try to abide by the commission’s motto: Living the Dream; Let Freedom Ring; Building Bridges for Unity and Understanding.)