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.
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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