Posted on 03/23/2015 3:04:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Izola Ware Curry, the mentally ill woman who in 1958 stabbed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Harlem book signing — an episode that a decade later would become a rhetorical touchstone in the last oration of his life — died on March 7 in Queens. She was 98.
Ms. Curry died in a nursing home, the last stop in the series of institutions that had been her home for more than half a century. Her death, confirmed by the office of the chief medical examiner of New York City, was first reported by The Smoking Gun, the investigative website.
What surprised many observers at the time of the crime was that Ms. Curry herself was black, the daughter of sharecroppers from the rural South. Questions persisted about what could have moved her to attack Dr. King, then a 29-year-old Alabama preacher who had assumed the national stage amid the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.
The stabbing nearly cost Dr. King his life, requiring hours of delicate surgery to remove Ms. Curry’s blade, a seven-inch ivory-handled steel letter opener, which had lodged near his heart. If he had so much as sneezed, his doctors later told him, he would not have survived.
SNIP
“Dear Dr. King,” it read. “I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School. While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”
To impassioned applause, Dr. King went on: “And I want to say tonight — I want to say tonight that I
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
OK, I admit it.
I’ve never heard this story before in all my life.
But then - it’s black on black crime. And the press has always buried that.
Neither have I.
Jilted lover?
ML King’s mother was shot to death in 1974 by a black man while she was playing the organ in church.
No kidding.... It's seems I heard this story ad nauseam today and not once was there a mention of the black on black nature of the stabbing.....
She was clearly mentally ill and was put away for a long time. RIP.
No photo. I had to go to the NYT link and fight my gag reflex to see the photo. I become nauseous when I have to refer to a commie-lib print rag.
And then I discovered that it wasn’t a hate-filled white person that stabbed Dr. King; but rather a woman with a dark tan. Probably polynesian.
That’s pretty sad. Church is one place you should feel safe in.
I never heard it either.
Interesting.
The one thing she did get right was that the NAACP is a communist organization.
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