WHEN MLK SURVIVED
Stabbed in Harlem in ’58, he went on to transform nation
It's a progressive medical school now, doing innovative research on dementia and immunology, but the spot where Harlem's Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine stands was once home to a bustling department store where a movement almost died.
It happened that fast, in the time it takes to click a ballpoint pen. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was signing copies of his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” on 125th St., in what was then Blumstein's department store. It was there that a mentally ill black woman, Izola Curry, stepped up to his table and plunged a 7-inch, ivory-handled steel letter opener into the minister's chest.
The tip of the blade landed on the edge of King's aorta, the body's main artery. Doctors told King if he had even sneezed he would have drowned in his own blood and died.
After he was stabbed, photos appeared in several newspapers of King being treated at the department store with the letter opener still protruding from his chest.
Sixty years later, on Thursday, Harlemites and historians are commemorating the Sept. 20, 1958, incident, remembering the doctors who saved him and praising the heavens still that King, just millimeters from certain death, did not sneeze.
“Dr. King had another decade in his life before he was assassinated,” said David Forstein, dean of Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine. “None of that happens, not in the way it did, had he died that day. It scares me to think where the country would have been had he died that day.”
King even reminisced about that day almost a decade later on what would be the last full day of his life. In a speech to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis a day before he was shot to death on a hotel balcony, King spoke about what he would have missed if he had let loose even a small sneeze.
“If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Ala., aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the civil rights bill,” King said, listing the accomplishments of that turbulent decade. “If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had.”
He was shot and killed by James Earl Ray the next day, April 4, 1968.
Touro students, faculty and administrators will join community leaders at the college Thursday morning to commemorate the stabbing and King's recovery. From there, they will march to Harlem Hospital to celebrate the staff surgeons — Aubre de Lambert Maynard, John Cordice and Emil Naclerio — who saved King's life.
Naclerio's son Ron Naclerio, a well-known high school basketball coach in the city, said he remains proud of the role his late father played in safely pulling the letter opener from King's chest. “I love bragging about this because this is historic,” said Naclerio, who said King and his father became good friends. “They just hit it off. Every time my father would go to Atlanta or Montgomery, he would look him up.”
Among the scheduled speakers at the Harlem event Thursday is the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader and president of the National Action Network. Sharpton, like King, was stabbed in the chest.
Sharpton was stabbed with a 5-inch steak knife in 1991 as he prepared to lead a march in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, against the verdict in the case of the 1989 murder of Yusuf Hawkins. Michael Riccardi was convicted of the assault on Sharpton, and Sharpton spoke at his sentencing hearing, asking for leniency.
History has even been kind to Curry, who died in 2015 at age 98. King, only 29 at the time he was stabbed, forgave her almost before the blade was out of his chest.
Curry told cops she wanted to kill King because she believed he was a Communist and had been spying on her. But doctors determined she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. She spent the rest of her life institutionalized.
Sylvia White, Harlem Hospital's deputy executive director, said the story of King's survival is so important it is included in orientation material distributed to new hires. “That was a turning point in the civil rights movement,” she said. “We tell that story whenever we can.”