James Parker

James Parker (1857-1908), police officer and entrepreneur. James Benjamin Parker was born a slave in Georgia and gained his freedom when the Civil War ended. Details about his early life are scarce, but various reports later stated that he worked as a police officer, train porter, journalist, mail carrier, newspaper salesman, and waiter in his home town, Chicago, Saratoga Springs, and New York City. In 1901 he was in Buffalo, working as a waiter for a catering company. Buffalo was then hosting an international fair called the Pan-American Exposition, and among the eight million visitors was U.S. President William McKinley, who greeted members of the public on September 6. Parker stood in the long line to meet McKinley, who had an underwhelming record on civil rights but was still more progressive than the previous president and was also symbolically important to African Americans as a Civil War veteran. Just in front of Parker was Leon Czolgosz, who approached the president and fired a hidden pistol, hitting McKinley twice at point blank range. Parker, who was said to be well over six feet tall and 200 pounds and was nicknamed “Big Jim,” immediately attacked Czolgosz. The accounts vary on the specific details. One Secret Service agent said that Parker punched Czolgosz in the neck and tackled him to the ground. Another witness said “with one quick shift of his clenched fist, he knocked the pistol from the assassin’s hand. With another, he spun the man around like a top and with a third, he broke Czolgosz’s nose. A fourth split the assassin’s lip and knocked out several teeth.” At first it appeared that McKinley would recover from his injuries, and Parker was praised around the country as the “tawny lion of the Exposition” who had saved the president’s life by preventing Czolgosz from firing more shots. In an interview several days later, he said “just think, Father Abe freed me, and now I saved his successor from death, provided that bullet he got into the president don’t kill him.” In another interview he declared “I heard the shots. I did what every citizen of this country should have done. I am told that I broke his nose – I wish it had been his neck. I am sorry I did not see him four seconds before…I am a Negro, and am glad that the Ethiopian race has what ever credit comes with what I did. If I did anything, the colored people should get the credit.” He also declined offers to sell his photograph or to appear in museums or on stage, telling one newspaper “I do not think that the American people would like me to make capital out of the unfortunate circumstances. I am glad that I was able to be of service to the country” and another “Many [African Americans] have written to me, telling me they were proud of me, and I could not after that turn myself into a dime museum freak.”

Some political leaders called for him to be offered a government job as reward for his actions. He was especially lauded by other African Americans, who noted that even as their race suffered from voting disenfranchisement, segregation, employment discrimination, racial violence, and impoverished conditions little better than slavery, a black man had stepped in to protect the leader of the country. This contrast was highlighted by the fact that Parker was a former slave, that McKinley was a Civil War veteran, and that in the decades since the war many white Americans had forgotten or chosen to ignore the loyalty of African Americans, the rebellion of white southerners, and the indifference or betrayal of some white northerners. Booker T. Washington praised him in a speech, black residents of Savannah made plans to “present a substantial testimonial,” and the black newspaper Savannah Tribune wrote “the life of our chief magistrate was saved by a Negro. No other class of citizens is more loyal to this country than the Negro.” This article turned out to be inaccurately premature, as eight days after the shooting McKinley died from gangrene and inflammation of the pancreas. In spite of this, many continued to praise Parker for his actions. Black Journalist John Mitchell noted that in the South, Czolgosz would be given rights that were denied to Parker and argued that white America’s failure to stop violence against African Americans had finally led to one of their own being killed, writing “President McKinley is the victim of the same lawlessness which he and the nation have tolerated.” The Rev. Lena Doolin Mason used Parker’s example to call for equal rights in her poem “A Negro In It,” writing:

“He knocked the murderer to the floor,

He struck his nose, the blood did flow;

He held him fast, all nearby saw,

When for the right, the Negro in it.

J.B. Parker is his name,

He from the state of Georgia came;

he worked in Buffalo, for his bread,

And there he saw McKinley dead.

White man, stop lynching and burning

This black race, trying to thin it,

For if you go to heaven or hell

You will find some Negroes in it.

You may try to shut the Negro out,

The courts, they have begun it;

But when we meet at the judgment bar

God will tell you the Negro is in it.”

When Czolgosz went on trial, though, Parker was not called to testify and the white witnesses denied his role. Some white newspapers now claimed that Parker had lied to get money and fame. African Americans became convinced that the Secret Service guards had conspired to lie because they were ashamed that a black man had done their job, and Parker himself said that “it looks mighty funny” that he had not been called to the witness stand. Although he was included in a widely produced 1905 drawing of the assassination, the offers of a government job never materialized. Black hopes that his heroism would lead to better race relations did not materialize. Only a month after McKinley’s death new president Teddy Roosevelt had dinner with Booker T. Washington at the White House, and a southern senator declared “we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back in their places.” Parker left Buffalo and became a public lecturer on the East Coast; some reports state that he also became a traveling salesman for the black magazine Gazetteer and Guide. His experiences in 1901, though, helped lead to mental illness and alcoholism. He was placed in a mental hospital in 1907, and after he died a year later, his body was given to a medical school to be dissected. Although he was largely forgotten, his actions became part of a long narrative of African American loyalty in the face of racism that eventually led to victories against that racism.

©David Brodnax, Sr.