CLOSE TO THE HEART OF MARTIN
60th ann’y of the day a stabbed MLK befriended NY doc
MIDDLE-aged and neatly dressed, Izola Curry did not have the cut of an assassin.
But that’s what made it all the more shocking when, on Sept. 20, 1958, the mentally ill woman produced from her handbag a 7-inch steel letter opener — and plunged it into Martin Luther King Jr.’s chest at a Manhattan signing for his book “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.”
And so, 60 years ago today, the beating heart of the civil-rights movement nearly ceased — until King was saved by two Harlem doctors.
If King had died that day, there would be no “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and no “I Have a Dream” building momentum for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The attention to housing rights that marked King’s later career — and spurred the Civil Rights Act of 1968 — might never have come into sharp focus.
“Without Martin Luther King Jr., there would be no civil-rights movement. My father allowed him those 10 extra years to continue the movement,” Ron Naclerio, whose thoracic-surgeon dad, Dr. Emil Naclerio, helped save King, told The Post.
WITH Curry’s dagger still buried in his chest, King was rushed to Harlem Hospital, where Dr. Naclerio and Dr. John Cordice were called in to save the leader of a burgeoning movement.
Naclerio was at home when the phone rang, his wife, Gloria, recalls.
“I remember we were getting ready to go to a wedding at the Waldorf. My husband had a tuxedo on, and I had my gown on, when the kitchen phone rang,” she told The Post last year, shortly before her death earlier this year.
“My husband answered it, asked a few questions, then hung up.”
Then “he looked at me and said there was a change in plans. He was going to take me to the wedding, but then he had go to work — he had an emergency. He didn’t say who or what the emergency was. That was my husband — he would have went to work no matter who the patient was.”
Curry’s blade was lodged in King’s sternum, just a hair’s breadth from his aorta — the main artery that pipes blood from the heart to the rest of the circulatory system — and Naclerio had to remove two ribs and go into King’s torso from the side, the son said.
The delicate procedure took the two physicians and their support team 2½ hours.
During his final speech a decade later, King would reveal that his doctors told him the slightest movement — even a cough or sneeze — could have irreparably ruptured the artery and drowned him in his own blood in a matter of minutes.
“I want to say tonight, I, too, am happy I didn’t sneeze, because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1960, when students all over the south started sitting in at lunch counters,” King said during his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968.
The following evening, nearly 10 years after the stabbing, a bullet fired by James Earl Ray killed King. But it couldn’t erase his world-changing achievements. Dr. Naclerio was crushed. “He was devastated. It was like a member of the family was killed,” Ron recalled. “He was very quiet all night, mostly staying in his office.”
THE intense reaction spokeke to the deep friendshipndship that Naclerio andand King forged after thehe surgeon saved his life.
“Whenn Dr. King was released,d, he bumpedd into my fatherher on the elevator,” vator,” Ron Naclerio clerio said. “King hugged my father, thanked d him, exchangedd numbers, rs, and a
King hugged my father, thanked him, exchanged numbers, and a strong 10-year friendship began. — Ron Naclerio, on his father, Dr. Emil Naclerio o (left), and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
strong 110-year friendship began. “They talked and saw each other ovover the next 10 years, calling the house on Thanksgiving and/or Christmas most years. They talked about a lot of things, King respected and trusted my father, ther, and he would bounce thoughts and ideas off my father. I think they each thought of the other as a genius.” King would test out passages from his forthcoming speeches on Naclerio, finding an intelligent ear and the kind of feedback only a movement outsider could provide, Ron remembered.
And so King, who died when Ron was 11, would influence the youngster’s early life — even if the boy at first didn’t realize just who his father’s friend was.
“One time, he called the house and I answered. My mother asked who it was. I said, ‘Some guy said he is a king.’ My mother grabbed the phone,” Ron Naclerio recalled, laughing.
King took the precocious youngster in stride.
“When I met him after that, he smiled and asked if I was the one who answered the phone. I smiled and said, ‘You would have been mad if I said you were a queen,’ ” Ron chuckled.
King visited the family when he was in New York, dining with the Naclerios at an Italian restaurant in Queens and a Manhattan steakhouse.
Years later, the doctor would educate his son about the man he had saved. “He said King was a great man, he was a gift from God, we were lucky to know him,” Ron recalled. T HE friendship between the Kings and the Naclerios extended well beyond King’s passing. At King’s funeral, his father Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. gave the elder Naclerio a signed copy of his autobiography, “Daddy King.”
“To Dr. Emil A. Naclerio. May God bless you,” reads an inscription signed “Martin Luther King Sr.”
When Dr. Naclerio died in 1985 at the age of 70, King’s widow, Coretta, paid her respects at the funeral. King’s daughter Bernice met Ron — who runs the basketball program at Cardozo HS in Queens and is the winningest coach in Public Schools Athletic League history — when he visited Atlanta in July of last year.
“Honored to spend time with Coach Ron Naclerio at The King Center today,” Bernice wrote in a Facebook post at the time. “Coach Naclerio’s father, Dr. Emil Naclerio, was the Harlem Hospital surgeon who saved my father’s life after he was stabbed in NYC in 1958.”
Privately, Bernice, 55, herself a civil-rights leader, acknowledged she would not have been born if not for Emil Naclerio, Ron said.
On Thursday, Harlem Hospital is hosting a special anniversary celebration of King’s rescue that will include re-enactments by two Harlem theater troupes of both the stabbing and the surgery.
It’s the second time the municipal hospital will have feted the anniversary, but there are also regular reminders of it.
“We do mention it every month — this is part of our orientation for new hires,” said hospital chief-of-staff Sylvia White. “We want them to understand the shoulders they are standing on.”