Man Who Tried to Save McKinley

Atlanta Negro, Who Jumped into Limelight, Is Now a Lunatic.

     James Parker, the negro who tried to save President McKinley’s life when Czolgosz fired his deadly shot at Buffalo, has gone raving crazy, according to a dispatch from Atlantic City to the Atlanta Journal, and is now in jail at that place. The giant physique of Parker—he is seven feet tall—made it almost impossible for the police to overpower him at Atlantic City when his madness began. He will be committed to an asylum, says the dispatch.
     Before going to Buffalo, where he almost prevented the president’s assassination, James Parker lived in Atlanta. For several years he held a job in the postoffice [sic] and was also a waiter at restaurants. His chief distinction was his Titanic size. He was broad and muscular in proportion to his height and of a dark, copper color. Once when he was arrested at Marietta for having been [in?] a fight, it was necessary to place him in a baggage car guarded by ten policemen to bring him to Atlanta, so near resistless were his efforts to escape.
     Leaving Atlanta Parker went first to Chicago, then to Washington, to New York and finally to Buffalo, at the time of the exposition. On the day of McKinley’s appearance Parker was in line waiting to shake hands with the president and was only a foot or two away from the president just as Czolgosz stepped from the crowd and fired. Parker sprang upon the assassin before the secret service men realized what had happened, and held him fast, despite the foreigner’s struggle to escape, until officers arrived.
     Though Parker never got credit for this work he afterwards went over the country delivering lectures on the incident and was heard by big negro audiences. Whether his insanity is permanent the dispatch from Atlantic City does not state.