In September 1958 Martin Luther King Jr. was autographing copies of his memoir Stride Toward Freedom (about the Montgomery bus strike) in a Harlem department store when a 42-year-old African American woman plunged a seven-inch penknife into his chest.
With the knife still lodged in his sternum, King was carried in his chair to an ambulance and rushed to Harlem Hospital where he was successfully treated.
The woman, Izola Ware Curry, was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Source: history,com