Jesse Jackson was not present or hiding behind a toilet during the attempted assassination.
Via NY Times
Izola Ware Curry, the mentally ill woman who in 1958 stabbed the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at a Harlem book signing — an episode that a decade later would become a rhetorical touchstone in the last oration of his life — died on March 7 in Queens. She was 98.
Ms. Curry died in a nursing home, the last stop in the series of institutions that had been her home for more than half a century. Her death, confirmed by the office of the chief medical examiner of New York City, was first reported by The Smoking Gun, the investigative website.
What surprised many observers at the time of the crime was that Ms. Curry herself was black, the daughter of sharecroppers from the rural South. Questions persisted about what could have moved her to attack Dr. King, then a 29-year-old Alabama preacher who had assumed the national stage amid the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.
The stabbing nearly cost Dr. King his life, requiring hours of delicate surgery to remove Ms. Curry’s blade, a seven-inch ivory-handled steel letter opener, which had lodged near his heart. If he had so much as sneezed, his doctors later told him, he would not have survived.[…]
Dr. King, who said afterward that he bore no animus toward Ms. Curry and did not want charges pressed, memorialized the attack in “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” That speech, delivered in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated, endures as one of his most famous.
“The X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery,” Dr. King said in the speech. “And once that’s punctured, you’re drowned in your own blood — that’s the end of you.”[…]
Apart from Dr. King’s speech, Ms. Curry vanished from history. Deemed unfit to stand trial, she was committed to a mental hospital; as the years elapsed and no more was heard of her, she was widely presumed dead. Even a 2002 book about the stabbing, “When Harlem Nearly Killed King,” by Hugh Pearson, does not chart her life’s later course.
Then, in a profile published last August, The Smoking Gun wrote of having found Ms. Curry, physically and mentally feeble, at the nursing home, Hillside Manor, in the Jamaica section of Queens.
“While Curry described her daily routine — up at 5:30 a.m., bed around 10 p.m., and not much going on in between,” the profile said, “she met questions about King and the stabbing with a furrowed brow and a blank stare.”
Izola Ware was born on June 14, 1916, near Adrian, a village in east-central Georgia. She appears to have had little education beyond grade school.[..]
On the afternoon of Sept. 20, 1958, Dr. King was autographing copies of his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” in Blumstein’s department store, at 230 West 125th Street.
Ms. Curry, elegantly attired in a stylish suit, jewelry and sequined cat’s-eye glasses, entered the store armed with a loaded .25-caliber automatic pistol and the letter opener. The pistol was secreted in her bra, the letter opener in her handbag. She pushed her way through the crowd to the table where Dr. King sat.
“Are you Martin Luther King?” she asked.
“Yes,” he replied, not looking up from the book he was signing.
She reached into her handbag.
“The next minute,” Dr. King later wrote, “I felt something beating on my chest.” He was taken to Harlem Hospital, where surgeons opened his chest and ever so gently withdrew the blade.
Ms. Curry was apprehended in the store. “I’ve been after him for six years,” she cried. “I’m glad I done it.”