The Peculiar Truth about the Woman Who Stabbed MLK

• September 20, 1958: On a Saturday afternoon in Harlem, 29-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. appeared at Blumstein’s Department Store to personally autograph copies of Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, his book about the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott initiated by Rosa Parks.

• Among the autograph seekers was a middle-aged black woman who wore a white blouse, a smart suit jacket with matching skirt, dangling earrings, and cat-eye glasses with sequins around the frames. Though she bore a stern face, the woman appeared to be a respectable citizen.

• “Are you Martin Luther King?” she asked. The civil rights activist said that he was as he continued signing books.

• Then the black woman removed a seven-inch-long letter opener from her handbag, surged through the crowd, lunged at King, and stabbed him in the chest.

• Police officers seized her, and Dr. King was rushed off to a nearby hospital with the letter opener still lodged in his chest near his heart.

• When asked why she had committed the terrible act, the woman replied that she “had been after him for six years.” Then she added, “I’m glad I done it.”

• Her name was Izola Ware Curry, a 42-year-old single woman who lived in Harlem.

• Born in rural Georgia in 1916, she became a high school dropout. Curry left home in her mid-20s and traveled to several major cities across the US finding work as a housemaid. None of the jobs lasted long.

• She moved to Harlem not long before the King stabbing, and residents called her a loner and a disagreeable woman. Her Southern accent was often too thick for neighbors to comprehend.

• Curry suffered from paranoid delusions.

• During the 50s, she suspected the NAACP was a communist organization who were purposefully stopping her from keeping jobs. Curry also believed Dr. King was a communist, which was why she intended to kill him.

• Her handbag contained the letter opener, but stuffed in her brassiere was a small caliber handgun. If she had used the pistol, King might have died on the spot.

• At the hospital, doctors spent two hours trying to save his life. The letter opener had come perilously close to his aorta. One surgeon stated that had Dr. King so much as sneezed the weapon would have killed him.

• Meanwhile, at Curry’s court appearance, the arraignment judge asked whether she was the individual who had stabbed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a knife. “No,” Curry said. “It was a letter opener.”

• She was sent to Bellevue Hospital for mental health evaluation where she was deemed a paranoid schizophrenic. Curry was declared mentally unfit to stand trial.

• A week and a half after the assault that nearly killed him, Dr. King forgave Ms. Curry. He stated that he bore “no bitterness toward her” and that he felt “no resentment.”

• Izola Ware Curry was remanded to a state hospital for the criminally insane. She lived to age 99 until she passed away in 2015.

• Dr. King referenced the stabbing in his ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech before his assassination in 1968. He said that he’d received a letter from an admirer who learned that he might have died from the assault if he had sneezed.

• Proud to have seen the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, King ended his speech by saying, “I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”