On Dec. 12, 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the Cadle Tabernacle radio ministry in downtown Indianapolis just three months after narrowly escaping death while at a book signing in Harlem, New York on September 20. The attacker was an African-American woman named Izola Curry. Her weapon was a seven-inch long letter opener that she plunged into the chest of the civil rights leader mere millimeters from puncturing his aorta. Izola suffered from paranoid delusions and was at first sent to Bellevue hospital for the criminally insane in New York City. Later she was judged to be incompetent to stand trial and was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane in Beacon, New York. She remains one of history’s mystery women.
By all accounts, Izola led a troubled life. Born into poverty in the segregated south before World War I, her life was an unremiting series of troubles. Her marriage was troubled. Her life was troubled. Her mind was troubled. Yet, this troubled “nobody” almost changed the face of American history forever. Where is she today? Is she alive or is she dead? No one knows.
It is believed that Izola Ware Curry was born to pair of itinerant sharecroppers in Adrian, Georgia in 1916. Izola Ware married James Curry and the couple lived in Savannah until the late 1930s when they separated. She moved to New York at the age of 20 and found work as a housekeeper. Although she has been described as a “part time domestic,” she was a full time anti-Communist. She lived on the top floor of a tenement house at 121 W. 122nd Street in Harlem. By the time she wandered into Blumstein’s department store in the fall of 1958, she was unemployed.
It seems that shortly after moving to Gotham City she developed delusions about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Izola’s mind, clouded with fear of a false enemy, began to fail her. She believed that the members of the NAACP were all Communists conspiring to keep her from getting and keeping a job. She couldn’t point to any specific person, but she was sure that “They were making scurrilous remarks about me,” she confessed. She convinced herself that the NAACP and Dr. King were watching her every move. As her paranoia grew into schizophrenia, she bought a gun.
Izola left her apartment on Friday night to go to the movies. As she approached the Theresa Hotel at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue, Izola noticed a large crowd, which she described as a mob. She walked around them. She heard a band playing music. It was a rally arranged by King that attracted both Gubernatorial candidates Nelson Rockefeller and Averill Harriman as well as noted black leaders like Jackie Robinson, Labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Borough of Manhattan President Hulon Jack. Duke Ellington and his orchestra provided the music. This was no small affair to be sure.
Harlemites showed up in such numbers that police closed off the street in front of the hotel. Izola asked someone in the crowd what all the fuss was about they told her it was “this King man” and he was going to be back tomorrow for a book signing. When she learned that King was the subject of the commotion, she reportedly began to heckle Dr. King loudly until several annoyed supporters drove her from the rally.
By the time of King’s arrival in Harlem that weekend, she was convinced that he was a Communist. Although she claimed to be stalking Dr. King for five years, when police asked her later, she didn’t even know his first name calling her victim “Arthur or Lucer or something like that.” Izola continued on to the theater where she watched a Tarzan movie that night. Before returning home, Izola stopped by to see a friend she called “Smittie.” Despite telling police officers that she had known him for twenty years, Izola couldn’t remember his last name or very little about him.
Just before three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, September 20, 1958, Izola left home for the last time. She later claimed that she “went out to do some shopping” and that she wasn’t looking for anything in particular, “just window shopping.” She entered Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem, about four blocks from her home. She looked around for a while taking note of the store’s “Buy Black” storewide promotion going on in honor of Dr. King’s appearance. Then she saw a crowd gathered around Dr. King for his book signing. Dr. King, who was fast emerging as the leader of the civil rights movement in America, was signing his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, his account of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott.
Dr. King remembered Izola asking “Are you Martin Luther King? I answered yes. I was looking down writing and the next minute I felt something sharp forcefully into my chest.” Izola Curry had reached into her bag, took out a letter opener, closed her eyes, and plunged the opener into Dr. King’s sternum. When asked why, she told the D.A. “because after all if it wasn’t him, it would have been me. He was going to kill me.”
According to Izola, “I walked up to him and I said to him, you have been annoying me a long time trying to get these children. I have no objection of you getting them in the schools at all, but why torture me? Why torture me? I’m no help to him by killing me. Don’t mean after all Congress is signing anything. By torturing me, don’t mean Congress is going to sign. I can still get a blood clot from this aggravation today. After that day, Congress isn’t going to sign anything, and I’m just dead.” Her remarks reveal the irrational thoughts running through her mind. When the D.A. asked Izola what Dr. King’s response was, she responded, “I was drunk in my head, and I don’t know what he said.”
As police officers grabbed Izola, her bag and its contents fell out into the floor. Besides the usual contents of her purse, Izola also had a white bone handle ,25 calibre Italian-made automatic pistol. She bought the gun in Daytona a year before for $26. She bought it, loaded it, and never took the gun out of her home until that day. When asked why she took it out that day, Izola told the investigators, “I haven’t got a job and what in world I’m going to do for a living, with their pulling me off the job every day and I’m trying to work and they’re trying to force me to make me drop my head to drink either become a prostitute, and I’m not either one. I was going to protect myself if some of these members attack me. Because I know his members are you know, following him.” She figured there would be trouble that day, that King or his followers would bother her as they had done before. Mrs. Curry told investigators that she had been to the police precinct on six occasions and had reported her concerns to the F.B.I. and President Eisenhower. She sought restraining orders against people whom she thought were out to get her.
When questioned by police at New York’s 28th precinct, she accused civil rights leaders of “boycotting” and “torturing” her as well as causing her to lose jobs and forcing her to change her religion. Izola believed that “dangerous connections were being forged between the civil rights movement and the Communist Party”. After authorities informed her that she was being charged with felonious assault and possession of firearms, she reportedly replied, “I’m charging him [King] as well as he’s charging me…I’m charging him with being mixed up with the Communists”.
After King identified Izola as the assailant from his hospital bed, she was taken to the West 127th precinct station in Harlem before being hauled off to the Bellevue “Bug House.” There, Dr. Theodore Weiss and Dr. John H. Cassity, both qualified psychiatrists, examined her. They found Mrs. Curry to be a paranoid schizophrenic and consequently incapable of understanding the charges pending against her. Most disturbing to the doctors were signs of confusion, giving irrelevant answers to direct questions. The doctors reported that “the patient fluctuated between occasional fairly logical thinking and very confused illogical thinking.”
Dr. King was rushed to Harlem Hospital. Before the letter opener could be removed, surgeons studied their options. The dagger had stopped on the surface of King’s aorta. Doctor’s decided to open King’s chest to remove the weapon. The operation was successful. From his hospital room three days after the stabbing, Dr. King issued a statement which harbored no ill will against Mrs. Curry. He hoped that she would get help. He thanked government officials, church leaders, and the thousands of people who sent flowers, cards, and letters. King saw the event not as an attack on one man, but as an attack of hatred.
As King received further word of his attacker’s mental state, he expressed his sympathy and issued a statement upon returning home (he left Harlem city hospital after two weeks) to Montgomery, Alabama: “I am deeply sorry that a deranged woman should have injured herself in seeking to injure me. I can say, in all sincerity, that I bear no bitterness toward her and I have felt no resentment from the sad moment that the experience occurred. I know that we want her to receive the necessary treatment so that she may become a constructive citizen in an integrated society where a disorganized personality need not become a menace to any man.”
Dr. King recovered and loved the symbolism of the “cross shaped” scar left on his chest from the attack. For the next decade he would lead the Civil Rights Movement to new heights. But, what if? What if Izola had used her loaded pistol? What if Izola had thrust her dagger a little harder? What if Dr. King had died? There would have been no March on Washington, no “I Have a Dream” speech, no Selma to Montgomery march. The speculations are endless. Dr. King himself occasionally reflected on the events of the day, wondering aloud on the implications.
Izola Curry was found incompetent to stand trial and on October 20, 1958 she was transferred from Bellevue Hospital where she had been in observation to a permanent home at the Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane for the rest of her life. To this day few, if any, know of the whereabouts of Izola Curry, or even if she is alive. She has disappeared from the face of the earth. Which is odd because would be assassins of public figures (especially in this age of information) are usually tracked very closely.
Izola Ware Curry’s fate is as mysterious and forgotten as the assassination attempt itself. What’s more, few Hoosiers recall that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. limped into Indianapolis to deliver a speech barely three months after that attack to speak in one our cities most iconic landmark buildings.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
