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On September 20, 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. could be seen calmly sitting in the shoe section at Blumstein’s Department Store with a letter opener protruding from his chest and a blood stain blooming across his white shirt.
King had come to the store in Harlem, New York, to sign copies of his book
Stride Toward Freedom, about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The event had gone smoothly until a well-dressed woman jumped the queue and, after confirming the author was indeed King, sunk the blade several inches into his sternum. A security guard and a newspaper reporter managed to catch the culprit before she could flee, and the crowd quickly devolved into panic. King himself did not. “That’s all right,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
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Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History
I am just old enough to remember Dr. King, but my appreciation of him developed in graduate school, thanks to one of my Stanford teachers, Clayborne Carson. Clay introduced me to a more complex, challenging figure than the one comfortably ensconced in the nation’s collective memory.
Everyone today quotes the “I have a dream” speech, but what do we know of the King who risked his political career to condemn the war in Vietnam, who declared that every bomb dropped overseas exploded in an American city, who asked what good it was to sit at a lunch counter if one couldn’t afford a hamburger, who marched in Chicago for fair housing and came to Memphis, where he died, to support striking garbagemen?