When Harlem Nearly Killed King (9 page)

Felton made his way to the emergency room, only to see Martin Luther King, Jr., lying on a gurney with a letter opener protruding from the middle of his chest. The very surprised Felton introduced himself to King and reassured him. Then he listened to King’s heartbeat and breathing. Everything seemed stable. He took an EKG. Again, everything seemed as close to normal as could be under the circumstances. As Felton completed his examination of King, a team of emergency room nurses, surgeons, and surgical residents raced into action and began preparing King for emergency surgery. His mission accomplished, Felton was now free to spend the rest of his day with his wife and their two friends. As he joined them, the emergency room began filling up with reporters, onlookers, and important people, such as Arthur Spingarn, A. Phillip Randolph, and aides to Mayor Wagner. It was as if the president of the United States had been brought in.

Governor Harriman was participating in a parade down Fifth Avenue when he was notified that King had been stabbed. He returned to his Upper East Side home and consulted with his aides, becoming extremely worried. This being an election year, any kind of negative publicity with regard to a celebrity could affect the outcome of the vote in November. Suppose King died on his watch? thought Harriman. People would spend time second-guessing,
maybe to the point of wondering why the governor hadn’t insisted on better security to accompany King on his visit. And why had they taken such an important figure to Harlem Hospital anyway? Why not Mount Sinai or Columbia-Presbyterian?

When he was notified of the stabbing, Rockefeller wasn’t in the city at all. Right after the Friday political rally in Harlem he made his way to nearby White Plains, just north of the city, for an appearance at a benefit for the George Washington Carver Community Center to shake hands with guests. Then, during the actual day of the stabbing, he made his way to Albany, the state capital, over one hundred miles away, for another campaign appearance. Upon hearing of the crisis, he issued a statement expressing shock and prayers for King. But he had no intention of making it back to New York City and over to Harlem Hospital.

Harriman and his entourage saw their opportunity to make hay with Negro voters (though by no means would they publicly express fear that the doctors at Harlem Hospital weren’t up to the task of saving King). They would merely demonstrate the governor’s concern by rushing to King’s side. They headed back uptown. When they arrived at Harlem Hospital, they demanded answers about who would be in charge of treating King. The nervous first detail among the hospital staff was already trying to locate that man, Chief of Surgery, Dr. Aubré Maynard. But this being a Saturday, the task was a difficult one. Little did they know that Maynard, who had been practicing medicine in Harlem for thirty-two years, was sitting in the Plaza Movie Theater on 59th Street, completely oblivious to all that was going on outside the theater.

TEN
waiting for little napoleon

IF THERE WAS
anything the doctors at Harlem Hospital were used to, it was responding to trauma emergencies. Being in the midst of a community so much of which was a ghetto, it wasn’t uncommon for depressed and frustrated Negro men to take out their anger about the racial realities they confronted on each other. Someone had too much to drink and became overly sensitive about a joke. Or a man had too much to drink and got fresh with another man’s woman, or became overly sensitive when another man said something to his woman. A fight broke out. There were weapons involved—a gun or a knife—and before you knew it, an ambulance just like the one that had picked up King from Blumstein’s Department Store was rushing in the latest stabbing or gunshot victim to Harlem Hospital. This type of thing happened
so often it was a staple of stereotypes regarding Negro communities and of jokes told about the usefulness of Harlem Hospital. At one point residents at Mount Sinai Hospital came to Harlem Hospital just to learn from the trauma cases. The only catch was that by 1958, often Caucasian physicians had the attitude that the majority of physicians at the hospital (being Negro) didn’t know the best way to handle what came through their facility.

This attitude was nothing new. Even though New York was a cosmopolitan city, Negro physicians in Harlem and in the rest of the city had been dealing with the medical community’s version of racial prejudice for quite some time (and members of the medical profession tended to be more conservative than members of other learned professions to begin with). For years it had been almost impossible for them to get staff appointments in the city’s large, respected public hospitals. An appointment at a municipal facility like Harlem Hospital was good for the experience. But as was true at all city hospitals, you couldn’t charge for your services. Thus for the patients who paid you, in 1958, there were few other facilities for Negro physicians to admit their patients. Notably within Harlem, there was nearby Sydenham Hospital (which opened its staff to Negro physicians in 1945), and for a time, Mount Morris Park Hospital which, before going bankrupt, had been run by a group of physicians inexperienced in management. For several years running, the lot of the Negro physician in New York City, and even in Harlem, had been a hard one, no matter how skilled he or she happened to be. Thus, particularly among those of the generation who trained prior to the 1930s, the implications
of the nascent civil rights movement led to feelings of bitterness that they were in the twilight of their careers and wouldn’t be able to benefit from the new day that was dawning. This sentiment was about to have huge implications with regard to surgery on Martin Luther King, Jr.

For a long time the typical Negro physician in Harlem had been used to the following: starting his day at seven or eight
A.M.
, he’d go to his office in the basement of a brownstone, for example, to see patients who preferred going to the doctor just before going to work. He’d stay and continue seeing other patients until noon. Then after lunch, he’d examine patients once more from one to four
P.M
. Then for his patients who couldn’t take time off from jobs—those who worked in Manhattan below 96th Street—he would have evening hours from six to nine
P.M.
, and stay until he examined the last patient, meaning he might not finish until eleven
P.M
. He might make house calls as well between afternoon and evening hours. These patients were often people on public assistance who couldn’t make it to a municipal hospital clinic. Such patients would call a central number downtown and the center would, in turn, call one of the Harlem physicians who had signed up for such services. Then the physician would go to the homes and treat the patients, receiving three dollars per call from the city.

As for your private patient, if he or she became severely ill and you were on the staff of Harlem Hospital and that patient had no problem going to a city hospital, you admitted her or him knowing you’d receive no compensation for her treatment. If your patient preferred going to a voluntary hospital whose staff you could not join because
it didn’t admit Negro physicians, then you referred her to a physician who could admit her and hoped that the proximity to your office after she got well meant she would return to you for regular checkups and treatment of illnesses that didn’t require hospitalization. And when it came to getting paid for services rendered to your patients with such limited incomes, you never sent bills. The typical patient paid what he could. And if he missed paying you for a prior visit but the next time he came he could afford to pay for that visit, you didn’t remind him of the previous visit he still owed you for. You just forgot about it. This had been the lot of the typical Negro physician in Harlem who trained prior to what was now a new era in medical education: the era of residency training programs in different specialties that took three or more years to complete. And the chief of surgery at Harlem Hospital whom everyone was now frantically searching for had trained in that earlier era. Yet for plenty of other reasons, Aubré de Lambert Maynard was a frustrated man. And a controversial one.

Charles Felton distinctly remembered what he had been told during his internship year when he rotated through the department of surgery for a three-month period. A senior resident insisted he was to stand up whenever Maynard entered the ward and always say good morning. He was to be dressed in not only the standard-issue white coat but a white dress shirt with tie, and white buck shoes. And he was to tell Dr. Maynard “Good morning,” yet not expect him to reply. A reply would be too much for this short, dark-skinned man of regal West Indian bearing to make to a lowly intern. Of course, plenty of surgical-staff chiefs
around the country were noted for the militarylike etiquette they expected their trainees to follow. But Maynard carried things a lot farther than this. Anyone who encountered him was immediately struck by an underlying bitterness emanating from him—a bitterness sometimes seen in talented, intelligent Negro men frustrated with the day-to-day conditions a Negro faced. It was a bitterness that easily turned into a facade of extreme arrogance around other Negroes, an arrogance that then turned into the need to impress in the presence of Caucasians of note in order to make it clear that this particular Negro stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Aubré Maynard spent most of his youth in his home country, Barbados (though he was born in British Guyana). It wasn’t until the age of fourteen, when his father sent for him, that he moved to New York City. Upon arriving, he received his high school education in a setting where he grew used to being the only Negro among Caucasians in rigorous academic settings. At overwhelmingly Caucasian Townsend Harris High, one of the most challenging public high schools in the country (alma mater of luminaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes), admission was gained only through exam. When Maynard first started attending, on the way home each day it became necessary for him to dodge Irish-American boys in the neighborhood intent on beating him up. Then he attended City College, where he majored in Physics in the era when the college was so academically well respected, it was known as “the poor Jewish man’s Harvard.” After that Maynard was the only Negro admitted to the class of 1926 at
Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. But he felt compelled to withdraw acceptance of the admission offer when told he would have to transfer to Howard University School of Medicine for his clinical years because Columbia’s teaching hospital (Columbia-Presbyterian) wouldn’t accept a Negro medical student on its wards. Maynard considered that an insult. He hadn’t even applied to Howard or Meharry. After withdrawing his acceptance to Columbia he attended New York University School of Medicine instead. Upon graduating he became one of the four Negro interns to break the color barrier on the house staff of Harlem Hospital. And to top it off, he scored higher than any other applicant that year for an internship, since these were also the days when medical graduates from everywhere coveted an internship at Harlem Hospital.

And now, thirty-two years later, he was Chief of Surgery. But on the day of September 20th, no one could find him. As Harriman, Spingarn, other VIPs, and hospital staff members who would have never been present on a Saturday gathered in the public corridor of the surgical suite, King was prepped for the emergency procedure. Surgical resident Leo Maitland and the nurses on the ward completed the “cut down,” connecting intravenous lines to him, taking his blood pressure, washing his chest, properly isolating the area for operation. King was wide awake, lucid, and calm. Maitland immediately contacted two chest specialists on staff. One was Emil Naclerio, an Italian American. The other was a talented young Negro who had just completed his training in Thoracic Surgery by the name of John W. V. Cordice.

Naclerio was in his home in the Bayside section of Queens, dressed in a tuxedo, about to go to a friend’s wedding at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Now he would have to skip the wedding. Cordice, with his daughter in tow, was collecting his mail at the office he was trying to open for private practice in the town of Orange, New Jersey. As soon as he heard that King had been brought in with a stab wound to his chest, Cordice raced to his car, headed for the New Jersey Turnpike, entered New York City via the George Washington Bridge, and made his way to the hospital. Upon arriving, he began examining the X rays a radiology resident had taken. While he was doing so, Naclerio walked in. Then came Austrian-born anesthesiologist, Helen Mayer. All three had always been ready to respond to such emergencies without the involvement of Maynard. Such cases came in so often, they were routine. Cordice, Naclerio, Mayer, and the radiologist on duty continued examining the X rays. They revealed that the tip of the blade of the letter opener that Curry had plunged into King’s chest was lodged right in the spot where the innominate artery cleaves off from the aorta, the primary blood vessel leading out of the heart.

Given King’s vital signs, it was clear that he wasn’t in any immediate danger. But suppose the blade moved? All it might take to get the tip to pierce the aorta was a mere cough. And, given the pressure of the blood coming out of the aorta, even a small pierce would quickly become a rip and King would hemorrhage to death before anything could be done to stop the bleeding.