Kristian Paulo P.

Flores TVL-A

21st Century Literature

1958

The Woman Who Tried To Murder Dr. King (the Izola Curry Case)

1. One-headline making crime in that particular year.

Source: The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/us/izola-ware-curry-who-stabbed-king-in-1958-dies-at-98.html?mcubz=0

2. Who was the perpetrator of the crime?

-Izola Ware Curry (Mentally Ill)

3. Who was the victim of the crime?

-Martin Luther King Jr.

4. Who were the witnesses to the crime?

-Mrs. Ann Arnold Hedgeman, Mayor Wagners administrative assistant

5. What were the details to the crime?

-In September 1958, Dr. King was an emerging activist who was hosting a book signing for his book, Stride Toward
Freedom: The Montgomery Story at Blumstein Department Store in Harlem, New York. While signing books, Dr. King
was approached by a 42-year-old black woman, Izola Ware Curry, who asked if he was really Martin Luther King Jr. After
responding yes, witnesses say Curry promptly took a letter opener out of her purse, closed her eyes and plunged it into
Dr. Kings chest. With the help of local police officers, first responders and the Harlem Hospital surgical team, Dr. King
fortunately survived the stabbing, but doctors said because the opener grazed the surface of his aorta, if she had
stabbed harder or if someone removed the object improperly, he probably would have drowned in his own blood.
6. When was the exact time and date of the crime?

- September 20, 1958

7. Where did the crime happen?

- Blumstein's Department Store in Harlem

8. Why did it happen? What was the motive of the perpetrator?

- Self-preservation: Because after all if it wasnt him it would have been me, he was going to kill me.
U.S.
Izola Ware Curry, Who Stabbed King in 1958, Dies at 98
By MARGALIT FOX MARCH 21, 2015
Izola Ware Curry, the mentally ill woman like to mention that Im a white girl. I read
who in 1958 stabbed the Rev. Dr. Martin in the paper of your misfortune, and of your
Luther King Jr. at a Harlem book signing suffering. And I read that if you had
an episode that a decade later would sneezed, you would have died. And Im
become a rhetorical touchstone in the last simply writing you to say that Im so happy
oration of his life died on March 7 in that you didnt sneeze.
Queens. She was 98. To impassioned applause, Dr. King went
Ms. Curry died in a nursing home, the last on: And I want to say tonight I want to
stop in the series say tonight that I, too, am happy that I
of institutions that didnt sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I
had been her wouldnt have been around here in 1960,
home for more when students all over the South started
than half a sitting in at lunch counters.
century. Her If he had sneezed, he continued, he would
death, confirmed not have seen the Freedom Rides of the
by the office of the early 60s, nor given his I Have a Dream
chief medical speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, nor
examiner of New seen the passage of the federal Civil Rights
York City, Act of 1964, nor been involved in the Selma-
was first reported to-Montgomery marches of 1965.
by The Smoking And so, Dr. King concluded, Im so happy
Gun, the investigative website. that I didnt sneeze.
What surprised many observers at the time He was shot to death by James Earl Ray in
of the crime was that Ms. Curry herself was Memphis the next day.
black, the daughter of sharecroppers from Apart from Dr. Kings speech, Ms. Curry
the rural South. Questions persisted about vanished
what could have moved her to attack Dr. from history. Deemed unfit to stand trial,
King, then a 29-year-old Alabama preacher she was committed to a mental hospital; as
who had assumed the national stage amid the years elapsed and no more was heard of
the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. her, she was widely presumed dead. Even a
The stabbing nearly cost Dr. King his life, 2002 book about the stabbing, When
requiring hours of delicate surgery to Harlem Nearly Killed King, by Hugh
remove Ms. Currys blade, a seven-inch Pearson, does not chart her lifes later
ivory-handled steel letter opener, which had course.
lodged near his heart. If he had so much as Then, in a profile published last August,
sneezed, his doctors later told him, he The Smoking Gun wrote of having found
would not have survived. Ms. Curry, physically and mentally feeble,
Dr. King, who said afterward that he bore at the nursing home, Hillside Manor, in the
no animus toward Ms. Curry and did not Jamaica section of Queens.
want charges pressed, memorialized the While Curry described her daily routine
attack in Ive Been to the Mountaintop. up at 5:30 a.m., bed around 10 p.m., and
That speech, delivered in Memphis on April not much going on in between, the profile
3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, said, she met questions about King and the
endures as one of his most famous. stabbing with a furrowed brow and a blank
The X-rays revealed that the tip of the stare.
blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main Izola Ware was born on June 14, 1916, near
artery, Dr. King said in the speech. And Adrian, a village in east-central Georgia.
once thats punctured, youre drowned in She appears to have had little education
your own blood thats the end of you. beyond grade school.
Of all the letters of consolation that poured After a brief early marriage to James Ware
in to the hospital, he continued, there was dissolved, Ms. Curry moved to New York,
one that I will never forget. where she found work as a domestic. There,
Dear Dr. King, it read. I am a ninth- she began to experience the paranoid
grade student at the White Plains High delusions that would overtake her
School. While it should not matter, I would completely before she was 40.
Her mental state made it increasingly hard
for her to hold a job. As Mr. Pearsons book
reported, she bounced among New York;
Cleveland; St. Louis; Charleston, W.Va.;
Savannah, Ga.; Miami, West Palm Beach
and Daytona Beach, Fla.; Lexington, Ky.;
and Columbia, S.C. By 1958 she was back in
New York, living in a rented room in
Harlem, at 121 West 122nd Street.
To her neighbors she was a very antisocial
woman, Mr. Pearson wrote. Curry spoke
with a distinct Southern accent, but her
words were often unintelligible.
A half-dozen
years earlier, she
had begun
having delusions
about
the National
Association for
the Advancement
of Colored
People, which she believed was a
Communist front. In her mind, the group
was persecuting her following her and
making it impossible for her to find steady
work. She wrote letters to that effect to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Over time, as Dr. King rose to prominence,
her delusions centered increasingly on him.
On the afternoon of Sept. 20, 1958, Dr. King
was autographing copies of his first book,
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery
Story, in Blumsteins department store, at
230 West 125th Street.
Ms. Curry, elegantly attired in a stylish suit,
jewelry and sequined cats-eye glasses,
entered the store armed with a loaded .25-
caliber automatic pistol and the letter
opener. The pistol was secreted in her bra,
the letter opener in her handbag. She
pushed her way through the crowd to the
table where Dr. King sat.
Are you Martin Luther King? she asked.
Yes, he replied, not looking up from the
book he was signing.
She reached into her handbag.
The next minute, Dr. King later wrote, I
felt something beating on my chest. He
was taken to Harlem Hospital, where
surgeons opened his chest and ever so
gently withdrew the blade.
Ms. Curry was apprehended in the store.
Ive been after him for six years, she cried.
Im glad I done it.