Video: 'If MLK Sneezed (MLK's Last Speech)'

(Saturday, September 20, 1958, 3:30 p.m. EDT; during the Civil rights movement) — The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American civil rights leader who urges his race to practice non-violent resistance to segregation, was stabbed today by an African-American woman in Blumstein’s department store in Harlem.

Izola Curry, who thought that King was conspiring against her with communists, struck King in the left chest with a letter-opener as he was autographing copies of his new book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story.

King, 29, who was taken to Harlem Hospital with the weapon still in his chest, underwent emergency surgery and remained hospitalized for several weeks.

Curry was later found mentally incompetent to stand trial.