Introduction

Summary

New York is the greatest city in the world—especially for my people. Where else, in this grand and glorious land of ours, can I get on a subway, sit in any part of the train I please, get off at any station above 110th Street, and know I'll be welcome?

—Dick Gregory, From the Back of the Bus

Located above Manhattan's 110th Street, Harlem had been the world's most famous predominantly black living space since the 1920s. On September 20, 1958, however, Martin Luther King Jr. did not receive the Harlem welcome the comedian Dick Gregory joked about. Instead, King, one of the rising stars of the civil-rights movement, encountered one of the truths about Harlem's postwar black community: it was not a like-minded monolith. The “Negro Capital of America” was home to a potent mix of generations, ideologies, languages, religions, cultures, classes, and mental states. On that day, the civil-rights leader was at Blumstein's department store on 125th Street signing copies of Stride toward Freedom. While there, Izola Ware Curry, a black woman who lived nearby, stabbed King in the chest with a letter opener. After surviving a delicate surgery and a bout of pneumonia at Harlem Hospital, King told the press that he hoped “all thoughtful people will do all in their power to see that she gets the help she apparently needs.”

Following her arrest, Curry found herself on Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward. Based on the psychiatrist's recommendation, the court determined that forty-two-year-old Curry was “not of sound mind,” committing her to Mattewan State Hospital that November. Even before the court's ruling, Harlem's leading newspaper, the New York Amsterdam News, uncovered a history of behavioral problems. Relatives recalled her strange demeanor, ramblings, violent tendencies, and paranoid delusions about Communist conspiracies involving black ministers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As far as her family knew, she had never seen a psychiatrist. Curry's nephew told the Amsterdam News that his aunt was “getting now what she should have had a long time ago—a psychiatric examination.”

How was it possible that Curry could have escaped medical notice in New York City, one of the postwar centers of psychiatric training, treatment, and innovation? Although other factors were involved, US medicine's longstanding mishandling and often outright neglect of African American health needs partly explains Curry's slip through the cracks.