THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON DR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR 60 YEARS AGO TODAY

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"On Sept. 20, 1958, 29-year-old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem, signing copies of Stride Toward Freedom, his account of the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott which he spearheaded.

Izola Curry, a well-dressed [but mentally ill 42-year-old black] woman, approached the reverend and asked if it was really him. When he replied yes, she said, “I’ve been looking for you for five years,” and plunged a letter opener into his chest.

When police arrived on the scene, they found the civil rights leader sitting in a chair with the letter opener’s ivory handle still protruding just below his collar.

Fearful of the blade’s proximity to King’s heart, Officer Al Howard warned him, “Don’t sneeze, don’t even speak.”

While his assailant was taken into custody, King was carefully rushed to Harlem Hospital, where chief of thoracic and vascular surgery John W.V. Cordice, Jr. and trauma surgeon Emil Naclero were quickly summoned. Coming from a wedding, Naclero arrived still wearing a tuxedo, and prepared for surgery.

In a painstaking operation, surgeons opened King’s chest, exposing his aorta, and removed the letter opener with a surgical clamp.

His would-be assassin was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and spent the rest of her life in mental institutions. King was quick to forgive her, saying in a press release on September 30 that he felt "no ill will" towards her and hoped that she would get the help she needed "to become a free and constructive member of society."

King’s surgeon told him that the police officer’s warning had been right: The edge of the blade had been resting on his aorta, and a sneeze would have caused a fatal puncture.

King recalled this detail 10 years later, in his “I've Seen the Mountaintop” speech of April 3, 1968. "I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze".

MARTIN LUTHER KING, "I'VE BEEN TO THE MOUNTAINTOP," APRIL 3, 1968

The day after delivering his speech, King was shot dead by assassin James Earl Ray in Memphis."

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