by Hugh Pearson
Miraculously, the rally ended without incident. But Hulan Jack was worried. He felt that in light of the heckling of Curry as well as Michaeux and his supporters, it was probably best for King to have a bodyguard for the remainder of his visit. He told King and Rowe this as the three of them stepped off the dais. “Oh God, don’t get a bodyguard!” King is alleged to have responded. Then, turning to Rowe, he said, “And don’t you try to act like one either.”
In light of what happened the following day, the three men would regret this decision.
EIGHT
crisis
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 20th was a beautiful sunny day. William Rowe made his way back to the Hotel Statler in midtown to pick up King and escort him to Blumstein’s. As he waited for King to arrive, Mr. I. B. Blumstein was a little nervous. The previous evening Micheaux’s supporters had picketed the store urging passersby to “Buy Black.” What if they reappeared? wondered Blumstein, who had a couple of police present just in case. Luckily no one came.
As they awaited King’s arrival, store employees set up a desk behind the shoe department. A photographer from Harper and Brothers also waited to take photos of King with various VIPs and others waiting for him to sign copies of his book. Short, elderly, bespectacled Arthur Spingarn waited too, along with about fifty other people, including an honor guard of female students from a local junior high school. Finally King, Rowe, and the rest of their entourage made their way inside. The decision was made that the first order of business was to take a photo of King and Spingarn together. As the photos were taken with King sitting at the desk, Spingarn standing above him, King smiling and turning to shake Spingarn’s hand, the fifty other people present patiently formed a line and waited their turns to have copies of their books signed. It was about 3:30 P.M. Suddenly Izola Curry waded through the throng, wearing her trademark earrings, sequined spectacles, and a nice dress covered by a blue raincoat. Under her coat she brandished a slender Japanese penknife with a gently curving blade six to eight inches long and a handle made of inlaid ivory. She also had a loaded Italian-made .32-caliber automatic pistol in her purse.
“Is this Martin Luther King?” she asked as she walked straight up to King, hands concealed in her raincoat. “Yes it is,” replied King, certain this was just one more of the many fans he had been greeting for four days. Suddenly Curry brought her hand out of her raincoat in an arc. Instinctively, King yanked his left arm up to block the letter opener, cutting his left hand as Curry plunged the blade into his chest. Quickly a bystander knocked Curry’s hand away from the blade before she could pull it out and stab King again. “I’ve been after him for six years!” shouted Curry. “I’m glad I done it!” Curry started to run. A group of women who had been flanking King began chasing her, brandishing umbrellas and shouting, “Catch her! Don’t let her go!” Before they could reach her, the store’s floor manager blocked their path. Walter Pettiford, an advertising executive for the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s principal Negro-owned newspaper, grabbed Curry’s left arm and swung her around so that he could grab her other arm. Then he proceeded to lead her toward the front of the store hoping to locate a store detective. As he held her, Curry kept repeating, “Dr. King has ruined my life! He is no good! The NAACP is no good, it’s communistic. I’ve been after him for six years. I finally was able to get him now!” Shortly afterward, I. B. Blumstein himself showed up with a security guard, who handcuffed her.
Meanwhile King sat still, calm, and lucid with the letter opener protruding from his chest. Spingarn tried to comfort him, holding his hand while they awaited the arrival of an ambulance. As they did so, a woman named Mrs. James Watson wanted to remove the blade (the elderly Mrs. Watson as well as a woman representing Mayor Wagner’s office would later be placed under doctor’s care due to stress from having witnessed the incident). But another witness who apparently had far more knowledge of the best way to handle such wounds insisted that no one touch it. While waiting, the stabbed King assured everyone, “That’s all right! That’s all right. Everything is going to be all right!”
At about 3:38 P.M. a phone at Harlem Hospital rang at the desk of Mrs. Constance Jennings. The person on the other end of the line told her that a man had been stabbed at Blumstein’s Department Store and that an ambulance was needed right away. About a minute later Ronald Adams, a Harlem Hospital ambulance driver, and Mrs. Russie Lee, a licensed practical nurse, sped down Seventh Avenue to Blumstein’s. Neither was yet aware that their patient was Martin Luther King. Upon arriving, Mrs. Lee, who had been a nurse for twelve years, looked at the letter opener protruding from the seated King’s chest. Calmly, just as the woman before her had done, she warned everyone surrounding King not to touch the blade because she knew that if the blade were pulled out, it could mean instant death.
Lee then ordered Adams to bring the ambulance around to the rear of the department store, on 124th Street. Meanwhile she and a police officer moved King, still sitting in the chair, to the back of the store. When the ambulance arrived, Mrs. Lee saw to it that King was carefully placed on his back. Adams then sprang into the driver’s seat. Lee got into the back next to King, who was fully conscious as Lee instructed him not to touch the letter opener. Without speaking, King did as he was told.
A few minutes before King’s arrival, Ruth Richards, an RN, was told the ambulance was on its way back to the hospital with King. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Even though she suspected the person on the other end of the line was kidding, she sprang into action. With the aid of two other RNs she began setting up blood plasma and preparing for what was called an emergency “cut down,” to save Martin Luther King, Jr. At 4:06 P.M., King was brought into the hospital, where Mrs. Jennings registered his name into the emergency room log.
NINE
why did they take king to
harlem hospital?
BY SEPTEMBER 1958, Charles Felton, a first-year resident at Harlem Hospital, felt lucky. He realized that the Negro medical universe was small, and for the most part segregated. The majority of Negro physicians and surgeons were excluded from most major medical centers, including those within New York City. Most received their M.D.’s from Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., or Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Then the bulk of them spent a year interning at one of a handful of hospitals: Freedman’s, the teaching hospital of Howard University’s medical school; George W. Hubbard, the teaching hospital of Meharry; or Harlem Hospital; Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis; Kate B. Reynolds Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Lincoln Hospital in Durham, North Carolina; Flint-Goodrich Hospital in New Orleans; Provident Hospital in Chicago; or John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. Residency training in the specialties was another matter. For most of the approximately 175 Negroes receiving M.D.’s every year across the country by the late 1950s, the choice was either Freedman’s, Harlem Hospital, Homer G. Phillips, Hubbard, or nothing at all. Felton was lucky enough to obtain one of these training slots. In September 1958, he was a first-year resident in Internal Medicine at Harlem Hospital.
Light brown in complexion, Charles was a native of New Orleans, where he graduated from Xavier University. Then for medical school he didn’t attend Howard or Meharry or any other American school. Instead he traveled overseas to the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. When he shopped around for internships to apply for back home in the U.S., Harlem Hospital was on the top of his list.
With approximately nine hundred beds, it was the largest hospital in the country training Negro M.D.’s. At the same time, though, this medical center to which the stabbed King had been rushed suffered from the plight of most big municipal hospitals. At the beginning of the twentieth century almost all such facilities in New York City had been alms houses, meaning large charity sanitariums for the poor. They featured large open wards, often outdated equipment, overcrowding, and did their best to maintain decent sanitary conditions on strained budgets. All of this was tru
e of Harlem Hospital, even as it employed more people than any other enterprise in Harlem. On an average day eleven babies were born on its maternity ward, while four persons on other wards saw their last days. At the same time, the hospital suffered from the same staffing shortages, low pay, and tensions between personnel common at municipal hospitals. And in the fall through the winter months, due to being located in a community with a tremendous number of poor residents, the census increased by as many as two hundred to three hundred patients, necessitating that beds be placed in the hallways and along the corridors, causing a person to encounter the sick even as he stepped off the elevators.
Yet as a place to gain experience treating the sickest of patients, you couldn’t beat large municipal hospitals. Bellevue was the largest in New York City, and by 1958 the largest hospital in the nation. So coveted were its wards for the variety of cases seen on them that the three most prestigious medical schools in the city had services there. Harlem Hospital was considered an excellent place in which to obtain experience too, though as yet it had no affiliation with a medical school. The hospital had been founded in 1887 in the days when the community was all Caucasian. It didn’t integrate its medical staff until 1925. And even as late as 1958 most of its departments were still run by Caucasians, though by then Negroes made up most of its interns and residents. The hospital also had a healthy share of foreign-born trainees. Among them were Charles’s Japanese wife, Hiroko, a resident in Obstetrics and Gynecology. On Saturday afternoon September 20th, Charles and Hiroko had just finished their shifts and were about to join two of their friends for lunch when Charles was called back into the hospital. He was told that as a first-year resident in Internal Medicine he was needed to assess an important patient who had just been brought into the emergency room with a stab wound.
Felton made his way to the emergency room, only to see Martin Luther King, Jr., lying on a gurney with a letter opener protruding from the middle of his chest. The very surprised Felton introduced himself to King and reassured him. Then he listened to King’s heartbeat and breathing. Everything seemed stable. He took an EKG. Again, everything seemed as close to normal as could be under the circumstances. As Felton completed his examination of King, a team of emergency room nurses, surgeons, and surgical residents raced into action and began preparing King for emergency surgery. His mission accomplished, Felton was now free to spend the rest of his day with his wife and their two friends. As he joined them, the emergency room began filling up with reporters, onlookers, and important people, such as Arthur Spingarn, A. Phillip Randolph, and aides to Mayor Wagner. It was as if the president of the United States had been brought in.
Governor Harriman was participating in a parade down Fifth Avenue when he was notified that King had been stabbed. He returned to his Upper East Side home and consulted with his aides, becoming extremely worried. This being an election year, any kind of negative publicity with regard to a celebrity could affect the outcome of the vote in November. Suppose King died on his watch? thought Harriman. People would spend time second-guessing, maybe to the point of wondering why the governor hadn’t insisted on better security to accompany King on his visit. And why had they taken such an important figure to Harlem Hospital anyway? Why not Mount Sinai or Columbia-Presbyterian?
When he was notified of the stabbing, Rockefeller wasn’t in the city at all. Right after the Friday political rally in Harlem he made his way to nearby White Plains, just north of the city, for an appearance at a benefit for the George Washington Carver Community Center to shake hands with guests. Then, during the actual day of the stabbing, he made his way to Albany, the state capital, over one hundred miles away, for another campaign appearance. Upon hearing of the crisis, he issued a statement expressing shock and prayers for King. But he had no intention of making it back to New York City and over to Harlem Hospital.
Harriman and his entourage saw their opportunity to make hay with Negro voters (though by no means would they publicly express fear that the doctors at Harlem Hospital weren’t up to the task of saving King). They would merely demonstrate the governor’s concern by rushing to King’s side. They headed back uptown. When they arrived at Harlem Hospital, they demanded answers about who would be in charge of treating King. The nervous first detail among the hospital staff was already trying to locate that man, Chief of Surgery, Dr. Aubré Maynard. But this being a Saturday, the task was a difficult one. Little did they know that Maynard, who had been practicing medicine in Harlem for thirty-two years, was sitting in the Plaza Movie Theater on 59th Street, completely oblivious to all that was going on outside the theater.
TEN
waiting for little napoleon
IF THERE WAS anything the doctors at Harlem Hospital were used to, it was responding to trauma emergencies. Being in the midst of a community so much of which was a ghetto, it wasn’t uncommon for depressed and frustrated Negro men to take out their anger about the racial realities they confronted on each other. Someone had too much to drink and became overly sensitive about a joke. Or a man had too much to drink and got fresh with another man’s woman, or became overly sensitive when another man said something to his woman. A fight broke out. There were weapons involved—a gun or a knife—and before you knew it, an ambulance just like the one that had picked up King from Blumstein’s Department Store was rushing in the latest stabbing or gunshot victim to Harlem Hospital. This type of thing happened so often it was a staple of stereotypes regarding Negro communities and of jokes told about the usefulness of Harlem Hospital. At one point residents at Mount Sinai Hospital came to Harlem Hospital just to learn from the trauma cases. The only catch was that by 1958, often Caucasian physicians had the attitude that the majority of physicians at the hospital (being Negro) didn’t know the best way to handle what came through their facility.
This attitude was nothing new. Even though New York was a cosmopolitan city, Negro physicians in Harlem and in the rest of the city had been dealing with the medical community’s version of racial prejudice for quite some time (and members of the medical profession tended to be more conservative than members of other learned professions to begin with). For years it had been almost impossible for them to get staff appointments in the city’s large, respected public hospitals. An appointment at a municipal facility like Harlem Hospital was good for the experience. But as was true at all city hospitals, you couldn’t charge for your services. Thus for the patients who paid you, in 1958, there were few other facilities for Negro physicians to admit their patients. Notably within Harlem, there was nearby Sydenham Hospital (which opened its staff to Negro physicians in 1945), and for a time, Mount Morris Park Hospital which, before going bankrupt, had been run by a group of physicians inexperienced in management. For several years running, the lot of the Negro physician in New York City, and even in Harlem, had been a hard one, no matter how skilled he or she happened to be. Thus, particularly among those of the generation who trained prior to the 1930s, the implications of the nascent civil rights movement led to feelings of bitterness that they were in the twilight of their careers and wouldn’t be able to benefit from the new day that was dawning. This sentiment was about to have huge implications with regard to surgery on Martin Luther King, Jr.
For a long time the typical Negro physician in Harlem had been used to the following: starting his day at seven or eight A.M., he’d go to his office in the basement of a brownstone, for example, to see patients who preferred going to the doctor just before going to work. He’d stay and continue seeing other patients until noon. Then after lunch, he’d examine patients once more from one to four P.M. Then for his patients who couldn’t take time off from jobs—those who worked in Manhattan below 96th Street—he would have evening hours from six to nine P.M., and stay until he examined the last patient, meaning he might not finish until eleven P.M. He might make house calls as well between afternoon and evening hours. These patients were often people on public assistance who couldn’t make it to a municipal hospital clinic. Such p
atients would call a central number downtown and the center would, in turn, call one of the Harlem physicians who had signed up for such services. Then the physician would go to the homes and treat the patients, receiving three dollars per call from the city.
As for your private patient, if he or she became severely ill and you were on the staff of Harlem Hospital and that patient had no problem going to a city hospital, you admitted her or him knowing you’d receive no compensation for her treatment. If your patient preferred going to a voluntary hospital whose staff you could not join because it didn’t admit Negro physicians, then you referred her to a physician who could admit her and hoped that the proximity to your office after she got well meant she would return to you for regular checkups and treatment of illnesses that didn’t require hospitalization. And when it came to getting paid for services rendered to your patients with such limited incomes, you never sent bills. The typical patient paid what he could. And if he missed paying you for a prior visit but the next time he came he could afford to pay for that visit, you didn’t remind him of the previous visit he still owed you for. You just forgot about it. This had been the lot of the typical Negro physician in Harlem who trained prior to what was now a new era in medical education: the era of residency training programs in different specialties that took three or more years to complete. And the chief of surgery at Harlem Hospital whom everyone was now frantically searching for had trained in that earlier era. Yet for plenty of other reasons, Aubré de Lambert Maynard was a frustrated man. And a controversial one.
Charles Felton distinctly remembered what he had been told during his internship year when he rotated through the department of surgery for a three-month period. A senior resident insisted he was to stand up whenever Maynard entered the ward and always say good morning. He was to be dressed in not only the standard-issue white coat but a white dress shirt with tie, and white buck shoes. And he was to tell Dr. Maynard “Good morning,” yet not expect him to reply. A reply would be too much for this short, dark-skinned man of regal West Indian bearing to make to a lowly intern. Of course, plenty of surgical-staff chiefs around the country were noted for the militarylike etiquette they expected their trainees to follow. But Maynard carried things a lot farther than this. Anyone who encountered him was immediately struck by an underlying bitterness emanating from him—a bitterness sometimes seen in talented, intelligent Negro men frustrated with the day-to-day conditions a Negro faced. It was a bitterness that easily turned into a facade of extreme arrogance around other Negroes, an arrogance that then turned into the need to impress in the presence of Caucasians of note in order to make it clear that this particular Negro stood head and shoulders above the rest.