NEW YORK: Accident in Harlem

In the shoe section of a crowded Harlem department store, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, 29, Negro leader of the peaceful, successful 1956 Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott, was autographing copies of his just-published book, Stride Toward Freedom; The Montgomery Story (Harper & Bros.; $2.95). Suddenly he was confronted by a Negro woman, who demanded: "Are you Mr. King?" King nodded: "Yes, I am." Then Georgia-born Izola Ware Curry, 42, who had lived in New York City on and off for half her life, suddenly flashed a steel letter opener and stabbed King in the upper left side of his chest. Customers shouted in panic, and a few onlookers grabbed the deranged woman and held her for police as she babbled incoherently and shouted: "I'm glad I done it." In her brassiere police found a small loaded pistol.

King, still conscious and calm, was rushed to the Harlem Hospital with the letter opener still in his chest, was soon followed by a score or so of well-wishers and Negro leaders. Also present: fleet-footed Governor Averell Harriman, who was campaigning for re-election in the city when he heard the news. Two and a quarter hours after King was taken to the operating room, a surgeon announced that the blade, narrowly missing the critical aorta near the heart, had been removed and that the victim had a good chance for full recovery. But Harlem's leaders would be a long time forgetting that the hero who had escaped gun and bomb blasts in Alabama had narrowly missed being killed in the center of the North's largest Negro community.