Lucy Parsons

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Lucy Parsons

Lucy Parsons (1853-March 7, 1942) was a radical American labor organizer, anarchist (and later, Communist) and is remembered as a powerful orator. She was born in Texas (likely as a slave) to parents of Native American, Black American and Mexican ancestry. She often went by Lucy Gonzales.

In 1871 she married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier, and both were forced to flee from Texas north to Chicago by intolerant reactions to their interracial marriage.

Described by the Chicago Police Department as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" in the 1920s, Lucy Parsons and her husband had become highly effective anarchist organizers primarily involved in the labor movement in the late 19th Century, but also participating in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women. She began writing for The Socialist and The Alarm, the journal of the International Working People's Association (IWPA) which she and Parsons were among the founders of in 1883.

In 1886, her husband Albert, who had been heavily involved in the labor movement for the eight hour day, was arrested and executed by the state of Illinois on charges that he had conspired in the Haymarket Riot—an event which was widely regarded as a political frame-up, and which marked the beginning of May Day labor rallies in protest.

In 1892 she briefly published Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly, and was often arrested for giving public speeches or distributing anarchist literature. While she continued championing the anarchist cause, she came into ideological conflict with some of her contemporaries, including Emma Goldman, over her focus on class politics over gender and sexual struggles.

Then, in 1905, she participated in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, and began editing the Liberator, an anarchist newspaper that supported the IWW in Chicago. Lucy's focus shifted somewhat to class struggles around poverty and unemployment, when she organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915, which pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Jane Addam's Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12. Parsons was also quoted as saying, "My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production." (Wobblies! 14) Parsons anticipated the sit down strikes in the US and, later, workers' factory takeovers in Argentina.

In 1925, she began working with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense in 1927, a communist-led organization that defended labor activists and unjustly accused African Americans such as the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon. While it is commonly accepted by nearly all biographical accounts (including those of the Lucy Parsons Center, the IWW, and Joe Knowles) that Parsons joined the Communist Party in 1939, there is some dispute, notably in Gale Ahrens' essay "Lucy Parsons: Mystery Revolutionist, More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters," which can be found in the anthology Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, Solidarity.

One of her last major appearances was at the International Harvester in February 1941. She died in 1942 in a house fire, and her lover, George Markstall, died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. The state still viewed Lucy Parsons as such threat to the status quo that after her death, police seized her library of over 1500 books and all of her personal papers.

[edit] Selected coverage in the New York Times

New York Times; March 8, 1942; page 36. Chicago, March 7, 1942. Lucy Parsons, 83 years old, noted anarchist whose husband was hanged for his part in the Chicago Haymarket riot in 1886, was burned to death late today when a fire broke out in her frame residence at ...