Free When Harlem Nearly Killed King by Hugh Pearson

the woman before her had done, she warned everyone surrounding King not to touch the blade because she knew that if the blade were pulled out, it could mean instant death.
    Lee then ordered Adams to bring the ambulance around to the rear of the department store, on 124th Street. Meanwhile she and a police officer moved King, still sitting in the chair, to the back of the store. When the ambulance arrived, Mrs. Lee saw to it that King was carefully placed on his back. Adams then sprang into the driver’s seat. Lee got into the back next to King, who was fully conscious as Lee instructed him not to touch the letter opener. Without speaking, King did as he was told.
    A few minutes before King’s arrival, Ruth Richards, an RN, was told the ambulance was on its way back to the hospital with King. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Even though she suspected the person on the other end of the line was kidding, she sprang into action. With the aid of two other RNs she began setting up blood plasma and preparing for what was called an emergency “cut down,” to save Martin Luther King, Jr. At 4:06 P.M. , King was brought into the hospital, where Mrs. Jennings registered his name into the emergency room log.

NINE
why did they take king to
harlem hospital?
    BY SEPTEMBER 1958 , Charles Felton, a first-year resident at Harlem Hospital, felt lucky. He realized that the Negro medical universe was small, and for the most part segregated. The majority of Negro physicians and surgeons were excluded from most major medical centers, including those within New York City. Most received their M.D.’s from Howard University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C., or Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Then the bulk of them spent a year interning at one of a handful of hospitals: Freedman’s, the teaching hospital of Howard University’s medical school; George W. Hubbard, the teaching hospital of Meharry; or Harlem Hospital; Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis; Kate B. Reynolds Hospital in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Lincoln Hospital in Durham,North Carolina; Flint-Goodrich Hospital in New Orleans; Provident Hospital in Chicago; or John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. Residency training in the specialties was another matter. For most of the approximately 175 Negroes receiving M.D.’s every year across the country by the late 1950s, the choice was either Freedman’s, Harlem Hospital, Homer G. Phillips, Hubbard, or nothing at all. Felton was lucky enough to obtain one of these training slots. In September 1958, he was a first-year resident in Internal Medicine at Harlem Hospital.
    Light brown in complexion, Charles was a native of New Orleans, where he graduated from Xavier University. Then for medical school he didn’t attend Howard or Meharry or any other American school. Instead he traveled overseas to the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. When he shopped around for internships to apply for back home in the U.S., Harlem Hospital was on the top of his list.
    With approximately nine hundred beds, it was the largest hospital in the country training Negro M.D.’s. At the same time, though, this medical center to which the stabbed King had been rushed suffered from the plight of most big municipal hospitals. At the beginning of the twentieth century almost all such facilities in New York City had been alms houses, meaning large charity sanitariums for the poor. They featured large open wards, often outdated equipment, overcrowding, and did their best to maintain decent sanitary conditions on strained budgets. All of this was true of Harlem Hospital, even as it employed more people than any other enterprise in Harlem. On an average day elevenbabies were born on its maternity ward, while four persons on other wards saw their last days. At the same time, the hospital suffered from the same staffing shortages, low pay, and tensions between personnel common at municipal hospitals. And in the fall