On Sept. 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry, a poor and "demented" woman from Georgia, became a footnote in history — just a literal sneeze away from being a major figure.
That was the day the sometime housekeeper and short-order cook plunged an ivory-handled, seven-inch letter opener into the chest of Martin Luther King Jr. while he was in Harlem for a book signing. She wanted to kill King, she said, because she believed he was a communist and had been spying on her.
Curry was quickly arrested and, within a month, was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane after doctors determined that she suffered from paranoid schizophrenia.
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The letter opener she used was so precariously close to King's aorta that had he sneezed, he would have punctured the aorta and died. A decade later, on April 3, 1968, he recalled the attack in his "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech.
The next day, an assassin’s bullet did what Curry couldn’t.
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