When Harlem Nearly Killed King

by Hugh Pearson

  King continued convalescing in Harlem Hospital, being checked on by Naclerio, Cordice, and Maynard. Coretta and the rest of his family continued to visit him. They also made public displays of concern for the rest of the patients in the hospital. On one of those days, as photographers trouped along, Coretta and her father-in-law donated some of the flowers King junior received to children on the Pediatric ward.

  As they did so, the civil rights rival who treaded lightly with King, who hadn’t appeared with him at the Friday night rally, also showed his concern. Roy Wilkins was on a trip to Long Island on the Saturday afternoon King was stabbed. When he returned to the city and heard news of the crisis, Wilkins joined the other luminaries at the hospital waiting for word of the outcome of surgery. Four days later he spoke with Coretta on the phone, assuring her that of all the hospitals in the world, her husband was in the best one he could be in for the treatment of knife wounds and pneumonia. The following day he wrote King a letter offering whatever help he needed while recovering from the stabbing.

  A week after surgery, King held a formal press conference while still in the hospital. He was asked what he thought of Curry; did he believe that she could have been part of a conspiracy by racists to assassinate him, specifically designing the execution to be performed by “one of his own,” since he wouldn’t expect that? “I have no knowledge of that,” King replied. “But it is a possibility. Even if she is unbalanced, an unbalanced person can be used by balanced people.”

  On the fourteenth postoperative day King was released from the hospital. But he had to remain in the city for approximately two more weeks. He would stay at the home of Reverend Sandy Ray, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Brooklyn (Ray was an old friend of Martin senior). Upon walking out of the hospital, King was greeted by a throng of about five hundred people, whom he spoke to informally. Then he was whisked off. A few days later he would appear before a grand jury along with witnesses to the stabbing, to recount what had happened. Their testimony, as well as the mental health tests performed on Curry, would result in her being declared mentally unfit to walk the streets and confinement to a state psychiatric facility for several years.

  As for the gubernatorial election that took place six weeks after the stabbing, the momentum favored Rockefeller until the final week and a half, when Democratic heavyweights finally rallied to Harriman’s support. Former President Harry Truman, a Democrat, released an indignant statement taking issue with Rockefeller’s implication that he was supporting him. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been bitter about the outcome of the state convention nominating Frank Hogan for senator, put that feeling aside and denounced Rockefeller’s running mate as entirely too conservative. And Harlem’s most powerful politician, who had been conspicuously absent during the King stabbing, and whom Republicans had tried to get to endorse Rockefeller, finally weighed in in favor of Harriman.

  Democrat Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., had famously crossed party lines in 1956 and endorsed Eisenhower for president. So it was not outside the realm of possibility that he would endorse the more liberal Rockefeller two years later for governor. Ever the pragmatic wheeler-dealer, Powell made peace with Tammany Hall leader Carmine De Sapio, agreeing to back Harriman in exchange for De Sapio backing his effort to become the first Afro-American chairman of a congressional committee. Once the deal was in place, Powell proceeded to lash out against Rockefeller, calling his family’s infamous support for Negro colleges nothing more than an effort to sustain “Jim Crow colleges” and buy their way into respectability. This, Powell opined, contrasted with the Rockefeller family’s lack of support for Negro civil rights. He claimed that in that regard their record was meager, as evidenced by their virtual lack of financial support to the NAACP.

  Then Powell leveled the charge that an important Republican party operative had approached him and offered him “a bundle” in an effort to get him to back Rockefeller. Charles Willis, the man who allegedly did this, had been a very important go-between in securing Powell’s endorsement of Eisenhower in 1956. Willis denied the bribery accusation, and in any case, had left no paper trail. Besides that, there was no verifiable connection between Rockefeller and Willis.

  Yet the accusations leveled by Powell severely damaged Rockefeller in the minds of Negro voters. On two consecutive nights just before the election, Rockefeller struck back before Harlem audiences. He denied the allegation of bribery, and proudly pointed out that his family’s record of philanthropy amounted to a total of $55 million donated to “aid Negro education.” And as for their support of current efforts on the part of Negroes to secure their civil rights, Rockefeller stated his family had been contributors to the NAACP since 1928. And he cited his personal donations to the potent NAACP legal defense fund whose work was responsible for catalyzing the U.S. Supreme Court decisions affecting schools in Little Rock. Personally, Rockefeller had contributed $5,000 to the fund in 1951 and 1956. He cited Thurgood Marshall himself as someone who could confirm this (which Marshall did).

  But the damage had been done. The Rockefellers staged a gala rally on Seventh Avenue in Harlem just a couple of weeks before the election, starring Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and comedian Nipsy Russell, all of whom the crowd loved and applauded. But when Rockefeller and his family and running mate took the stage, their applause was anemic. On the first Tuesday in November, Averell Harriman, the same man who grew nervous over King being taken to Harlem Hospital, won Harlem and the rest of the Negro vote. Yet he lost the general election to Rockefeller by more than half a million votes.

  FOURTEEN

  subsequent fates

  UPON LEAVING New York City and returning to the Deep South, Martin Luther King, Jr., of course, would go onto accomplish all that he subsequently became known for: civil rights campaigns in places such as Albany, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Selma, Alabama, and so forth, until that fateful day in Memphis in April 1968. As for the hospital in Harlem briefly cast into the limelight, subsequent years would not prove to be so advantageous. As the fifties came to an end, hospitals across the country experienced a shortage of physicians, resulting in a opening of the floodgates to foreign medical graduates. By 1960, one-third of all hospital staff members in the country were graduates of medical schools in places other than the United States or Canada. The figure for New York City was even higher: 48 percent. And Harlem Hospital, of course, was hardly immune. Foreign medical graduates began composing most of the house staff since city hospitals were less desirable than voluntary and university-based hospitals, due to the lower salary and quality of services provided to their interns and residents. The only department that continued to attract plenty of U.S. graduates was Maynard’s department: Surgery.

  A result of this barely regulated entry of so many foreign medical graduates into the United States was a diminished quality of patient care at numerous hospitals across the country. Too many of the foreign medical graduates didn’t have the basic skills necessary for good patient care. By 1960, the American medical establishment decided to require a test that all foreign medical graduates had to pass. When twenty-three interns at Harlem Hospital failed the exam, it caused an immediate controversy in the press. The only department that had no foreign medical graduates fail was Surgery. Something had to be done.

  That same year, in the interest of saving city hospitals from a reduced quality of medical care, Dr. Willard Rappleye, dean of the medical school at Columbia, came up with a plan both to pay attending physicians to staff city hospitals full-time and to affiliate every city hospital with a medical school. The following year, Dr. Ray E. Trussel, commissioner of the city’s Department of Hospitals, recommended to Columbia’s medical school that it change its city hospital affiliation from Bellevue to Harlem Hospital, which was much closer. The recommendation would cause a tremendous uproar. One reason was because in the world of medicine there had always been a wide gulf between academic physicians and physicians in private practice. In the case of Harlem Hospital this gulf w
ould be further exacerbated by race. Afro-American physicians at Harlem Hospital hardly welcomed the prospect of oversight from a medical school such as Columbia, one of the most prestigious in the entire country and thus one where the faculty tended to look down on physicians from elsewhere in the city (with the exception of those affiliated with Cornell’s medical school). By the same token, plenty of Columbia faculty members hardly welcomed the prospect of taking under their wing an essentially Afro-American hospital in Harlem. The faculty member who was particularly nasty in that regard would prove to be Dr. Stanley E. Bradley, Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine.

  This department was the one weak spot at Harlem Hospital. The department heads and administrators decided that the best way to rectify the weakness now that the attending staff would be paid would be to recruit a good Afro-American specialist in internal medicine. Yet every single one of the prospects interviewed and presented to Columbia as a new prospective head of the department—the most talented Afro-American physicians in the area—was rebuffed by Columbia. A Caucasian physician was chosen instead. Even after that, the chairman of Columbia’s Department of Internal Medicine refused to place Harlem Hospital’s department under his jurisdiction. It was placed instead under the supervision of Columbia’s Department of Administrative Medicine. The situation in the department wouldn’t improve until 1968, when Gerald Thompson, an Afro-American, was appointed Chief of Internal Medicine at Harlem Hospital. By that time Aubré Maynard had reached mandatory retirement age and was no longer Chairman of the Department of Surgery.

  In 1969, an entirely new Harlem Hospital was opened at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street, still affiliated with Columbia, an affiliation that continues to this day, though most of the attendings and house staff remain predominantly non-Caucasian.

  epilogue

  FOR ONE WEEK in September 1958 the lives of King, Harriman, Rockefeller, Curry, Michaeux, Maynard, Cordice, and others intersected in a manner that exposed human dynamics on many different levels. When King arrived in New York City, he understood the importance of the people of Harlem to the nascent struggle he was leading in the South, and the importance of broadcasting his message to the nation as a whole through his new book and through speeches. To do so would help raise much-needed funds for the work ahead. No doubt he understood the quid pro quo he was part of, involving the gubernatorial contest between Rockefeller and Harriman. With his popularity King could draw Negro voters for the two candidates to speak to while demonstrating their support for the exciting developments taking place in the South. What the presence of Rockefeller and Harriman, in turn, did for King was to further legitimize the new movement he was anointed to lead: If the scions of two of the most powerful and wealthy families in America supported the activism taking place, then that was all the more reason for those in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms (the politicians in Washington …) to take seriously the movement’s demands.

  Because the movement had garnered the endorsement of such powerful people, it was important for King to steer clear of Lewis Michaeux while in Harlem. Here was a man who represented everything that Malcolm X was just beginning to articulate in the same community and, within the space of five years, would popularize among young Northern Negroes as a whole: the goal of ridding oneself of all vestiges of dependency on “the goddamn white man.” This was a natural outgrowth of the exhilarating atmosphere of liberation, the equivalent of marking your territory, defining for yourself who you are. Nevertheless, for King to be associated with a man like Michaeux, who articulated a position that many Caucasians considered racism in reverse, could have killed the newborn movement before it even walked.

  On another front stood Izola Curry, who represented the extreme extent to which a person could take rational fears until they turned into mental illness. Curry was a complex mixture of human pride gone berserk, believing that Negroes shouldn’t have to protest for rights that were naturally theirs, and that Communists had quite a bit of covert influence within civil rights organizations. In that regard she shared some of the beliefs of the leadership of the very organization she despised. Roy Wilkins and Thurgood Marshall also believed that actively protesting for rights was the wrong road for Negroes to travel down. Yet the NAACP felt compelled to support King and the Montgomery protest, both to try to appear on top of any racial confrontation taking place anywhere in the nation and because after the protest reached the courts, it entered the purview of the organization’s strongest division: its legal defense fund.

  Where Curry parted company with the NAACP was not only in her paranoia that the NAACP itself was controlled by Communists but in her conviction that Negroes should appeal directly to the federal government rather than to the courts for their rights. Then there was her skepticism regarding Negro preachers. Behind closed doors, plenty of fellow Negroes complained that this segment of Negro America was composed of selfish men with gigantic egos who had no other avenue for the expression of their licentiousness and greed. (Ella Baker, the first executive director of SCLC, hired until a permanent director could be found, also had her doubts about Negro preachers; it took much convincing to get her to take the job.) Did not the charges of infidelity against Abernathy, precipitating the embarrassing attack in Montgomery, and the egos King dealt with among his fellow preachers prove that these concerns were indeed merited?

  After Curry stabbed King, Averell Harriman dramatized the degree to which politicians tend to say what they think voters want to hear rather than what they really believe. Then he demonstrated that for the politician the first thing that comes to mind is how it will affect the election. So he searched for a competitive advantage. Just before the crisis, through his speeches Harriman professed a belief in racial equality. Yet after it, in fearing that it was a mistake to take King to Harlem Hospital, Harriman revealed that he really didn’t trust the intelligence of Negroes as he did Caucasians, even in the face of the stereotype that stabbings and shootings were all that Harlem Hospital surgeons handled. (This stood in stark contrast to the attitude of Roy Wilkins that because the hospital handled so many cases of this kind, there was nothing to worry about.) Nevertheless, Harriman rushed to Harlem Hospital to convey an electoral image of touching concern for King (a concern that no doubt, at a certain level, was sincere).

  Then there were Aubré Maynard’s fabrications of what happened to Martin Luther King, Jr., in the operating room. They would survive, even in King’s own account of what happened. In 1998, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. was published by Warner Books. In Chapter 12 entitled, “Brush with Death,” King describes how he was attacked by Curry. Before the operation even began, he writes:

  I lay in bed for hours.… Days later when I was well enough to talk to Dr. Aubré Maynard, chief of surgeons, who performed the delicate, dangerous operation, I learned the reason for the long delay that preceded surgery. He told me that the razor tip of the instrument had been touching my aorta and that my whole chest had to be opened to extract it … It came out in The New York Times the next morning that if I had sneezed, I would have died.

  King went on to describe how his days of convalescence in New York after the attack reinforced his conviction that the new civil rights movement had to hold on to the spirit of nonviolence. With that in mind he returned to Montgomery and got back to work. Apparently he was never told that the real reason for the delay was because Maynard could not be found. And as the preceding pages demonstrated, it had hardly been necessary to open his entire chest for an operation in which Maynard was not the principal surgeon.

  The earliest known version of the truth of what happened in the operating room was revealed after publication of a short article in The New York Times on January 14, 1996. The occasion was King’s birthday holiday. Reporter Sarah Kershaw interviewed the then ninety-four-year-old retired Maynard about the King stabbing incident and subsequent surgery. Maynard told Kershaw about being in the Plaza Theater in midtown Manhattan when King was brought in. He
told her about the anger of Governor Harriman that it took so long for him to be located, and that after reassuring the governor he introduced himself to the prostrate King, then examined and reassured him. Then he told Kershaw that he immediately decided upon the manner in which King should be treated. After that, stated Maynard, “We started the surgery and it was carried out, I would say successfully.” But that was as much detail as he gave. After that Maynard went on to describe the surprise of one of King’s entourage the next day upon their arrival, that a “big white surgeon” had not been the one who performed the operation. Maynard concluded his account of the events to Kershaw by noting that Harlem Hospital was looked down upon, thus, “It was up to me to show the world that [we could save King].”

  Two and a half weeks later John Cordice decided to break his silence regarding the details of what happened in the operating room. He wrote a letter to the Times acknowledging his silence over the years out of deference to Maynard. Then he went on to detail why he was breaking his silence. He stated that he wanted “serious historians” to know what really happened, and that it was also because all the other surgeons involved in the drama other than Maynard were now dead (Emil Naclerio died in 1984 of congestive heart failure at the age of sixty-nine). Finally, in addition it was because it was quite possible that he, Cordice, was suffering from prostate cancer and his own days were numbered (Cordice would survive). Then he gave his account of what really happened. But the Times never published the letter, probably because in Kershaw’s article not enough detail of what took place was provided to merit refutation of anything Maynard said, and the details of the operation provided by Cordice ran far longer than letters in the Times usually run.