ping
...Czolgosz shot him twice in the abdomen.
“I would have fired more,” Czolgosz later confessed, “but I was stunned by a blow in the face.”
The blow came from an African-American waiter named James Parker, who reacted faster than McKinley’s guards to the gunfire. As the rest of the crowd turned on Czolgosz, McKinley instructed them not to hurt the “poor misguided fellow,” according to PBS. He then told his secretary, “My wife, be careful… how you tell her, oh be careful.”...
Italian and American police suspected Czolgosz was tied to L’Era Nuova (New Era), the same anarchist group as Gaetano Bresci, assassin of Italian King Umberto I. Bresci had been involved with this group and related groups such as Gruppo Diritto all’Esistenza (Right to an Existence Group) in Paterson, New Jersey, which was a center of the anarchist movement and became an active center for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), one of the predecessors of the future Communist Party USA.