When Harlem Nearly Killed King (8 page)

“One day!” responded the crowd. Then he criticized the president for refraining from stating that the Supreme Court school desegregation decision should be obeyed not only because it was now the law but because it was also morally right, and that his failure to do this created a vacuum into which bigots and demagogues felt free to move.

As he said this, Izola Curry started up again calling Caucasians racists. Once more Rowe tried to calm her down.

Soon it was King’s turn. And Lewis Michaeux, with twelve supporters in tow, let King know how he felt about being snubbed. At the Empire State Bookstore the day before, it was estimated that King autographed at the rate of three books per minute and signed a total of five hundred copies. “I’ve been here for twenty-two years as the leading Negro bookstore in Harlem,” complained Michaeux to a reporter. “And yet King and his publishers didn’t even come to see me.”

King ignored Michaeux and his supporters and delivered his prepared remarks. He voiced support for integrating the Little Rock schools, calling upon the federal government to step in and take over if necessary. “Many of you had hoped I would come here to bring you a message of hate against the white man because of
what has happened,” he continued, obviously referring to what happened to him during the Abernathy fiasco. “I come with no such message. Black supremacy is just as bad as white supremacy.” This utterance was met with mingled applause. “I come with a message of love rather than hate,” he continued. What he said next would become a standard refrain throughout his days as the principal disciple of nonviolence in the movement: “Don’t let any man make you stoop so low that you have hate. Have love in your hearts for those who would do you wrong.” Surprisingly, in light of the fact that this was Harlem, cheers for these words rose to a crescendo, drowning out the jeers of Izola Curry, who had started up her heckling once more, protesting that no Negro should ever try to cooperate with a Caucasian.

Miraculously, the rally ended without incident. But Hulan Jack was worried. He felt that in light of the heckling of Curry as well as Michaeux and his supporters, it was probably best for King to have a bodyguard for the remainder of his visit. He told King and Rowe this as the three of them stepped off the dais. “Oh God, don’t get a bodyguard!” King is alleged to have responded. Then, turning to Rowe, he said, “And don’t you try to act like one either.”

In light of what happened the following day, the three men would regret this decision.

EIGHT
crisis

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER
20th was a beautiful sunny day. William Rowe made his way back to the Hotel Statler in midtown to pick up King and escort him to Blumstein’s. As he waited for King to arrive, Mr. I. B. Blumstein was a little nervous. The previous evening Micheaux’s supporters had picketed the store urging passersby to “Buy Black.” What if they reappeared? wondered Blumstein, who had a couple of police present just in case. Luckily no one came.

As they awaited King’s arrival, store employees set up a desk behind the shoe department. A photographer from Harper and Brothers also waited to take photos of King with various VIPs and others waiting for him to sign copies of his book. Short, elderly, bespectacled Arthur Spingarn waited too, along with about fifty
other people, including an honor guard of female students from a local junior high school. Finally King, Rowe, and the rest of their entourage made their way inside. The decision was made that the first order of business was to take a photo of King and Spingarn together. As the photos were taken with King sitting at the desk, Spingarn standing above him, King smiling and turning to shake Spingarn’s hand, the fifty other people present patiently formed a line and waited their turns to have copies of their books signed. It was about 3:30
P.M
. Suddenly Izola Curry waded through the throng, wearing her trademark earrings, sequined spectacles, and a nice dress covered by a blue raincoat. Under her coat she brandished a slender Japanese penknife with a gently curving blade six to eight inches long and a handle made of inlaid ivory. She also had a loaded Italian-made .32-caliber automatic pistol in her purse.

“Is this Martin Luther King?” she asked as she walked straight up to King, hands concealed in her raincoat. “Yes it is,” replied King, certain this was just one more of the many fans he had been greeting for four days. Suddenly Curry brought her hand out of her raincoat in an arc. Instinctively, King yanked his left arm up to block the letter opener, cutting his left hand as Curry plunged the blade into his chest. Quickly a bystander knocked Curry’s hand away from the blade before she could pull it out and stab King again. “I’ve been after him for six years!” shouted Curry. “I’m glad I done it!” Curry started to run. A group of women who had been flanking King began chasing her, brandishing umbrellas and shouting, “Catch her! Don’t let her go!” Before they could reach her, the store’s floor manager blocked their path. Walter Pettiford, an advertising executive for
the
New York Amsterdam News
, the city’s principal Negro-owned newspaper, grabbed Curry’s left arm and swung her around so that he could grab her other arm. Then he proceeded to lead her toward the front of the store hoping to locate a store detective. As he held her, Curry kept repeating, “Dr. King has ruined my life! He is no good! The NAACP is no good, it’s communistic. I’ve been after him for six years. I finally was able to get him now!” Shortly afterward, I. B. Blumstein himself showed up with a security guard, who handcuffed her.

Meanwhile King sat still, calm, and lucid with the letter opener protruding from his chest. Spingarn tried to comfort him, holding his hand while they awaited the arrival of an ambulance. As they did so, a woman named Mrs. James Watson wanted to remove the blade (the elderly Mrs. Watson as well as a woman representing Mayor Wagner’s office would later be placed under doctor’s care due to stress from having witnessed the incident). But another witness who apparently had far more knowledge of the best way to handle such wounds insisted that no one touch it. While waiting, the stabbed King assured everyone, “That’s all right! That’s all right. Everything is going to be all right!”

At about 3:38
P.M.
a phone at Harlem Hospital rang at the desk of Mrs. Constance Jennings. The person on the other end of the line told her that a man had been stabbed at Blumstein’s Department Store and that an ambulance was needed right away. About a minute later Ronald Adams, a Harlem Hospital ambulance driver, and Mrs. Russie Lee, a licensed practical nurse, sped down Seventh Avenue to Blumstein’s. Neither was yet aware that
their patient was Martin Luther King. Upon arriving, Mrs. Lee, who had been a nurse for twelve years, looked at the letter opener protruding from the seated King’s chest. Calmly, just as the woman before her had done, she warned everyone surrounding King not to touch the blade because she knew that if the blade were pulled out, it could mean instant death.

Lee then ordered Adams to bring the ambulance around to the rear of the department store, on 124th Street. Meanwhile she and a police officer moved King, still sitting in the chair, to the back of the store. When the ambulance arrived, Mrs. Lee saw to it that King was carefully placed on his back. Adams then sprang into the driver’s seat. Lee got into the back next to King, who was fully conscious as Lee instructed him not to touch the letter opener. Without speaking, King did as he was told.

A few minutes before King’s arrival, Ruth Richards, an RN, was told the ambulance was on its way back to the hospital with King. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Even though she suspected the person on the other end of the line was kidding, she sprang into action. With the aid of two other RNs she began setting up blood plasma and preparing for what was called an emergency “cut down,” to save Martin Luther King, Jr. At 4:06
P.M.
, King was brought into the hospital, where Mrs. Jennings registered his name into the emergency room log.

NINE
why did they take king to
harlem hospital?

BY SEPTEMBER 1958
, Charles Felton, a first-year resident at Harlem Hospital, felt lucky. He realized that the Negro medical universe was small, and for the most part segregated. The majority of Negro physicians and surgeons were excluded from most major medical centers, including those within New York City. Most received their M.D.’s from Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., or Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Then the bulk of them spent a year interning at one of a handful of hospitals: Freedman’s, the teaching hospital of Howard University’s medical school; George W. Hubbard, the teaching hospital of Meharry; or Harlem Hospital; Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis; Kate B. Reynolds Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Lincoln Hospital in Durham,
North Carolina; Flint-Goodrich Hospital in New Orleans; Provident Hospital in Chicago; or John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. Residency training in the specialties was another matter. For most of the approximately 175 Negroes receiving M.D.’s every year across the country by the late 1950s, the choice was either Freedman’s, Harlem Hospital, Homer G. Phillips, Hubbard, or nothing at all. Felton was lucky enough to obtain one of these training slots. In September 1958, he was a first-year resident in Internal Medicine at Harlem Hospital.

Light brown in complexion, Charles was a native of New Orleans, where he graduated from Xavier University. Then for medical school he didn’t attend Howard or Meharry or any other American school. Instead he traveled overseas to the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. When he shopped around for internships to apply for back home in the U.S., Harlem Hospital was on the top of his list.

With approximately nine hundred beds, it was the largest hospital in the country training Negro M.D.’s. At the same time, though, this medical center to which the stabbed King had been rushed suffered from the plight of most big municipal hospitals. At the beginning of the twentieth century almost all such facilities in New York City had been alms houses, meaning large charity sanitariums for the poor. They featured large open wards, often outdated equipment, overcrowding, and did their best to maintain decent sanitary conditions on strained budgets. All of this was true of Harlem Hospital, even as it employed more people than any other enterprise in Harlem. On an average day eleven
babies were born on its maternity ward, while four persons on other wards saw their last days. At the same time, the hospital suffered from the same staffing shortages, low pay, and tensions between personnel common at municipal hospitals. And in the fall through the winter months, due to being located in a community with a tremendous number of poor residents, the census increased by as many as two hundred to three hundred patients, necessitating that beds be placed in the hallways and along the corridors, causing a person to encounter the sick even as he stepped off the elevators.

Yet as a place to gain experience treating the sickest of patients, you couldn’t beat large municipal hospitals. Bellevue was the largest in New York City, and by 1958 the largest hospital in the nation. So coveted were its wards for the variety of cases seen on them that the three most prestigious medical schools in the city had services there. Harlem Hospital was considered an excellent place in which to obtain experience too, though as yet it had no affiliation with a medical school. The hospital had been founded in 1887 in the days when the community was all Caucasian. It didn’t integrate its medical staff until 1925. And even as late as 1958 most of its departments were still run by Caucasians, though by then Negroes made up most of its interns and residents. The hospital also had a healthy share of foreign-born trainees. Among them were Charles’s Japanese wife, Hiroko, a resident in Obstetrics and Gynecology. On Saturday afternoon September 20th, Charles and Hiroko had just finished their shifts and were about to join two of their friends for lunch when Charles was
called back into the hospital. He was told that as a first-year resident in Internal Medicine he was needed to assess an important patient who had just been brought into the emergency room with a stab wound.