Found: The Long-Lost Link to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Last Speech

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The night before Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination 50 years ago, he built the theme of his renowned "mountaintop" speech around a young girl's letter, which has never surfaced—until now

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Found: The Long-Lost Link to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Speech

The night before his assassination 50 years ago, he built a theme of his “mountaintop” speech around a fan’s letter—which has never surfaced until now

By Cameron McWhirter

http://twitter.com/cammcwhirter
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March 30, 2018 11:31 a.m. ET

On the night before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated—50 years ago next week—he delivered a 43-minute unprepared speech to a crowd of more than 2,500 people at a black church in Memphis. It became known as the “mountaintop” speech, one of his most renowned. ... While thunder rumbled outside and windows rattled, Dr. King recounted how a decade earlier in Harlem, a deranged black woman had stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener. The blade had come so close to Dr. King’s aorta, his doctor told reporters, that if he had sneezed just then, he would have been killed.

Toward the end of the April 3, 1968, speech, the last he ever delivered, the 39-year-old Dr. King mentioned a letter that he had received while recuperating in Harlem Hospital from the 1958 stabbing. It began, he said: “‘I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School.’ She said, ‘While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl.’ ” The letter concluded, Dr. King said, “I am so happy you didn’t sneeze.” ... “If I had sneezed,” Dr. King repeated that night as a refrain, there would not have been the many achievements of the civil-rights movement in the previous decade, including the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act and the sanitation workers’ strike that he was in Memphis to support.

For a half-century, historians and researchers haven’t been able to locate the letter or its author. They have scoured archives, checked yearbooks and asked alumni at the school. Frank Williams, executive director of the White Plains,N.Y., Youth Bureau, said that he has tried for years to figure it out. Andy Bass, a historian who has researched Dr. King’s ties in Westchester County, looked into the sneeze letter’s origins and eventually grew skeptical that it existed, he said. ... Michele Schoenfeld, district clerk and de facto historian of the White Plains City School District, said that she has received inquiries about the unnamed girl and the sneeze letter every year for the past 35 years. “We’ve never been able to find anything,” she said recently.

But the mystery, it would seem, has finally been solved. In one of the world’s largest archives of Dr. King’s correspondence, owned by his alma mater Morehouse College, The Wall Street Journal has found a letter that contains the “sneeze” passage. ... Jean Kepler, a 37-year-old white mother and civil-rights activist from Pleasantville, N.Y., near White Plains, wrote Dr. King a three-page letter with blue ink on white paper. It ended with: “I am so glad you didn’t sneeze!”
....

Write to Cameron McWhirter at [e-mail]

Appeared in the March 31, 2018, print edition as 'Found: The Long-Lost Link to King’s Last Speech.'

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