When Harlem nearly killed King : the 1958 stabbing of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. / Hugh Pearson

the long version

"When Harlem Nearly Killed King tells the tale of a little-known episode in the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - how, in 1958, King was stabbed by an emotionally disturbed woman in Harlem, and then saved by a team of Harlem Hospital's surgeons. The incident occurs in the wake of the 1956 Supreme Court decision to desegregate buses in Montgomery, Alabama, after the year-long boycott - a triumph for King. Pearson unearths the political power play between N.Y. gubernatorial candidates W. Averell Harriman and Nelson Rockefeller vying for the Black vote, between King's surgeons jousting for credit, and among Harlem's leading figures of the day seeking to roll out a red carpet for King.". "As Pearson captures the historical moment, in the Northern cities many of the ideas of racial equality were still just that - ideas, symbols, not yet facts of life. In Pearson's hands, the 1958 life-threatening episode becomes, in a sense, a mortal danger to the very soul of a nation attempting to put racism behind it. With his unique understanding of the nature of the American experience, Pearson recreates America at the dawn of the civil rights movement and shows us how change really occurs: painfully, not in one grand gesture, but in a thousand small and contradictory ways. There emerges a powerful portrait of change in race perspectives in America, one that suggests there is still work to be done."--BOOK JACKET.