“Had Dr. King sneezed or coughed, the weapon would have penetrated the aorta. He was just a sneeze away from death,” Naclerio was quoted as saying by Jet magazine in the aftermath of the stabbing.
Nearly a decade later, on April 3, 1968, King spoke of this close call in a dramatic speech to nearly 2,500 people crowded into the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to support striking sanitation workers. Recounting his near-death experience, King said, “I want to say tonight, I, too, am happy I didn’t sneeze, because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters.”
He told the audience that if he had sneezed, he would have missed the Freedom Riders, the Selma to Montgomery march, the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act and the March on Washington in which he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” “If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”
King ended his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech with a rhetorical flourish in which he seemed to prophesy his own death. Less than 24 hours later, an assassin’s bullet felled King as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Back in New York City, the news of King's assassination devastated Naclerio. “It was like a family member died,” says his son. Naclerio attended King’s funeral, and the preacher’s widow, Coretta, paid her respects in person when the surgeon passed away in 1985.
The one solace taken by Cordice and Naclerio in the wake of King’s death came from the knowledge that they had helped to change the course of history by saving his life in 1958. “I think if we had lost King that day,” Cordice said in a Harlem Hospital video before his death in 2013, “the whole Civil Rights era would have been different.”