Note: Interest
in the long life of labor agitator and anarchist Lucy Parsons has been rising for some time
as the labor movement has begun re-embracing its radical roots and during the
spontaneous mass actions around the country represented by the Occupy Movement
a few years ago. Despite her
purposefully obscured racial identity, she has also inspired Black women of the
Black Lives Matters movement. A 2017 biography, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of
Lucy Parsons, American Radical by
Jacqueline Jones has ramped that
interest even higher. The book, based on
new research and discoveries, challenges the commonly accepted story of her
origins with mixed Mexican, Native American, and mulatto Texas roots and
identifies her as originally a Virginia born slave.
There were hard times in Chicago on
January 17, 1915. Hell, there were hard
times across the country. The nation had never
really recovered from the Panic of 1910, and then plunged again into a sharp recession that had been dragging
on since 1913. Business activity had fallen
off a staggering 25%. Unemployment was not yet measured accurately, but was rife especially in the great industrial cities like Chicago. Hardest
hit were the armies of casual
laborers who in the best of times floated from temporary work to temporary work, the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled
industrial workers, immigrants,
and the flood of displaced farm and small-town workers who
flooded the city looking for non-existent
work.
On top of the winter of 1914-15 was one of the harshest since the turn of
the century. Tens of thousands of the ragged
homeless roamed the streets, their bodies found frozen in the soot-grimed
snow. Some found refuge in train stations and even police
precincts and fire houses on the
most brutal nights. Soup
kitchens could not keep up with demand.
In addition to the bums and hobos the city was accustomed to seeing even in good times, there were more and more women and children among the homeless as wave
after wave of evictions hit the slum districts. Newspapers wrung their hands—not so much
at the plight of the poor, but at
the impositions their suffering
placed on respectable citizens. Something had to be done and one woman, Lucy Parsons, knew damn well what to
do.
Parsons was one formidable woman with decades of working class struggle behind her and a reputation that literally terrified
the powers that be. Just a few years later the Chicago Police would report that the
then septuagenarian was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”
Her exact origins were obscure
and made intentionally murkier by
her own efforts. Lucia Eldine Gonzalez—the birth
name she claimed—was said to born
somewhere in Texas around 1853,
almost surely in slavery. She was apparently
of mixed ethnic and racial origins. Surely, she was part Black and lived among Blacks.
In the immediate post-Civil War
Era she was married to or lived with an ex-slave named Oliver
Gathings.
Around 1870 she met Albert Parsons, a dashing former Confederate soldier who had become a
passionate Reconstruction Republican. He edited
Republican newspapers in Texas, supported full suffrage for Freedmen,
and railed against night riders like the emerging Ku Klux Klan. He was under constant threat to his life,
had been beaten, kidnapped, and shot in the leg in
various incidents. Lovely
young Lucy became Parson’s fearless
ally and then lover. She abandoned
Gathings to be with him and their relationship
only fueled anti-miscegenation rage.
In 1872 the couple fled for their lives and settled in
Chicago in 1873 where Parsons eventually found work as a typographer for the Chicago News. Lucy worked as a seamstress and dressmaker. They lived as man and wife although no marriage
documents have ever been found. Due to bitter
social ostracism and criminal liability she denied Black heritage and explained her
brown skin as the result of Mexican and Indian—Creek—lineage in addition to White ancestry. This
apparently fooled few people, either
Black or White. She was regularly denounced as a Mulatto in her lifetime.
Both of the Parsons rapidly rose to leadership in Chicago’s working
class movements. Albert was active
in his craft union and the Central Labor Council. Becoming increasingly radicalized both joined the infant Socialist Labor Party (SLP) in
1876. He would run for City Council under it banner.
When the Great Railway Strike of 1877 swept into the city, Albert emerged as
an important leader and spoke to crowds of 25,000 or more. While not
giving up previous affiliations, both joined the International Working People’s Association—the so-called Anarchist First International and
became its most influential English language leaders in a movement dominated in the city by Germans.
Albert was black balled from work at his trade
eventually becoming editor of the
English language anarchist paper Alarm! Lucy opened a dressmaking shop to support her husband and a young son but also became a leader in efforts to organize the needle trades and other women
dominated occupations.
In 1886 the IWPA became the principle organizer in Chicago of the May 1st national Eight Hour Day Strike. As
many as 350,000 workers walked off their
jobs in the first three days of May making Chicago the effective epicenter of the national movement. There were also coincidently major on-going
strikes, including one by thousands of workers at the McCormack Reaper Works. Albert
was one of the speakers to a rally of
strikers there on May 3 when police
opened fire on the crowd killing
four workers and wounding scores. At the same time Lucy was leading women
garment workers on strike.
Both helped publicize and promote a
protest rally at the Haymarket on
the rainy evening of May 4, but
neither was able to be at the event. None-the-less when a bomb went off amid charging
police Albert was among the
anarchists sought by police. Alerted to the danger, Albert managed to escape
to Wisconsin where he hid out for several days. Lucy was arrested
and closely questioned, but released. Eventually Albert returned to the city to turn
himself in to stand trial with six other anarchists for the riot.
Lucy visited Albert in jail daily
where she took dictation of his memoirs
and gathered profiles of all of the
other defendants. These she published in pamphlets as part of her relentless campaign to support the
accused. She raised money for the defense,
spoke at numerous rallies and meetings, and wrote articles and letters
that made the trial an international cause celeb.
Parsons and her children went to visit her husband one last time, but she was arrested, stripped naked, and thrown into a cell at Cook County Jail on
November 11, 1887 as Albert was lead to the gallows singing her favorite ballad Annie Laurie in his clear tenor voice. When it was
over she was allowed to go home. But she first vowed to the press to
continue the fight.
Lucy lost her dress shop and was reduced to stark poverty after Albert’s death. Supporters
formed the Pioneer Aid and Support
Society which raised money for the Monument
at the Haymarket Martyr’s grave site
at German Waldheim Cemetery and
also provided Parsons with a meager $8 a month subsistence stipend.
Parsons continued to work to preserve the memory of her husband and his co-defendants and to advance the
causes of anarchism and a militant labor movement. She sold the pamphlet biographies and later a
handsomely mounted book, The
Autobiography of Lucy Parsons which consolidated them all with steel engravings into one volume to
support herself and her work. She also
made speeches and attempted to lecture. But the relentless
Chicago Police broke up her meetings and threatened hall owners who might rent to her for her lectures and repeatedly arrested her when she
tried to sell her pamphlets and books on the street.
The harassment just made Parson’s more determined and made her a leading
voice for free speech as well as
for worker’s rights. In 1893 the courts finally ruled that even
anarchists had free speech rights
although police harassment of her continued.
Despite these travails, Parsons grew in
stature world-wide. In 1888 she was
invited to London to address the Socialist League of England on a program in which she shared the dais with the Russian anarchist Prince
Peter Kropotkin. During the same
trip she was invited to become a contributor
the leading French radical
periodical, Les Temps Nouveaux.
The same year back in Chicago she
became a harsh critic of labor leaders who threw their lot in with the Democratic
Party in hopes of moderate reforms
and “practical” concessions. Parsons
believed that such half-measures not
only cheated the working class, but delayed the systematic revolution that would abolish capitalism once and for all.
Previously a trade unionist Parsons looked at the open class warfare engendered by disputes
like the Homestead Steel Strike in Pennsylvania and in the silver mines of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho and
concluded that they were harbingers of successful social
revolution and that industrial
unionism was the strongest
organizational tool of the working class.
Parsons expounded these views in Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist
Monthly which she founded
and co-edited. She found her views confirmed in the Pullman
Strike of 1894.
Her recognized leadership among American anarchists was challenged by a younger rival, Emma Goldman,
after Goldman emerged from prison for her part in her lover Alexander Berkman’s attempted
assassination of steel baron Andrew
Carnegie’s partner and right-hand man Henry
Clay Frick. Goldman took to the lecture platform and often spoke to middle-class and upper-class liberal audiences for money, which Parsons considered a betrayal. Worse, Goldman strayed from single minded attention to the class struggle to embrace many issues of personal freedom including free love.
Although Parsons was resolutely feminist in advocating for the complete
emancipation of women and their equality with men in work and social
arrangements, she felt that free love was both a bourgeois indulgence and a threat
to the family as the bulwark of strength for workers of
both sexes. The two bitterly sniped at each other in their writings and occasionally in public confrontations for years.
In 1905 Parsons attended the Continental Congress of the Working Class which
united socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and trade unionists in a new militant organization that almost perfectly mirrored Parsons’s views—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She took out the
second Red Card issued to a woman
and joined the likes of radical industrial unionists William D. “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners and William Trautman of the Brewery
Workers, Daniel De Leon of the SLP (much
changed since her early membership of that organization years before), and Eugene V. Debs former leader of the American Railway Union and founder of
the Socialist Party (SP.)
Although first De Leon in a 1906 huff and much more quietly Debs some
years later departed the IWW for its
refusal to engage in electoral
political action, that was just fine
with Parsons who had no faith in either reformism or politics. Although she never
was employed by the union, she voluntarily worked for it and promoted its goals in public appearances and in a new periodical, The
Liberator supported by and supporting of the union which made women’s equality issues a major focus.
During and after the string of
panics and recessions that began in 1907, Parsons became particularly interested in the plight
of the unemployed. In San
Francisco Parsons and IWW members assumed leadership of the Unemployment Committee which began staging mass meetings and marches to
demand public works projects to put
people to work. When police
threatened Parsons famously led one
parade with hundreds of women. Almost
two years of agitation the
unemployed of the city gained some
concessions from the city.
Parsons had always been leery
of reformist demands like public
works programs, but came to see how the mass
struggle for them emboldened the
working class, gave it experience in
self-organization, and could be a pathway to ultimate revolution.
Back in Chicago during the cruel winter of 1914, Parsons had
a model and the experience to stage a similar campaign. Just the announcement
of the march set the city nabobs on edge.
After all, Parson’s had never
minced her words. The mighty
Chicago
Tribune quoted her as recommending
during the terrible depression of 1882-85:
Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or
a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or
shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it
be a war of extermination.
As
handbills advertising the planned march spread around the poorest precincts of the city and announcements were printed in the active and multi-lingual radical press stirred up so much excitement that Ralph Chaplin, the editor of the IWW’s publication Solidarity, was moved to furnish an anthem for the march. He already had some verses that he had penned
while working with Mother Jones during
the bitter 1912-’13 Kanawha County, West Virginia coal miner’s strike. He polished them up and added a new, particularly incendiary verse:
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
He set it to music and rushed copies to
the printer to be sung by the
marchers. Solidarity Forever became
not only the theme song for the IWW,
but the great anthem of the whole
labor movement, although more conservative
unions would expunge that verse
and modify others when they used it.
As many as 15,000 of the unemployed
and their labor movement supporters
marched behind Lucy Parsons on January 17, 1915 demanding immediate relief. Parsons,
naturally, was arrested.
The impressive
success of that march encouraged more moderate
members of the labor movement to act. The IWW’s bitter conservative craft union rival the AFL, the Socialist Party, and Jane
Adams Hull House organized a second massive demonstration on February 12.
It was a one-two punch, the labor equivalent of bad cop/good cop. The interventions of the relative moderates gave city officials
an opening to announce immediate plans
to decentralize emergency relief
including soup kitchens and shelters as well a beginning projects to hire the
unemployed for everything from hand
shoveling snow from city streets and pot
hole repair to building sidewalks
and paving previously muddy side streets. None of which would have happened if Lucy
Parsons hadn’t scared the crap out of
them first.
Within three years Ralph Chaplin would be one of the 101 IWW leaders tried in Chicago for war-time subversion under the Espionage Act. Like all the rest, and 64 others tried at
Leavenworth, Kansas he was sentenced to prison and served four
years of a twenty-year sentence.
Parson’s rival Emma Goldman was one
of the aliens rounded up in the post-war Red Scare and was deported on
the so-called Bolshevik Arc to the Soviet Union.
Parson’s turned her attention to defense work. By 1924 she had drifted from the IWW because its General Defense Committee would not extend its support to
Communists. She also began to
believe that the classic anarchism
that she had long advanced had failed to ignite revolution but that the Soviet experience showed a new way. It was not an overnight thing.
In 1925 she began working with the National Committee of the International
Labor Defense which was backed
by the Communists and worked on behalf of unjustly
accused African Americans such
as the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon.
During yet another
Depression the now 80-year-old returned to agitating for the unemployed and
advocated the formation of unemployed unions. She spoke
regularly at Chicago’s Bughouse
Square free speech forums where a kid
named Studs Terkle listened with
rapt attention to her still fiery
speeches. The Chicago Police still wasted
no opportunity to harass her and friends had to always be ready to bail her out on petty charges.
Despite the estrangement
from the official IWW and her increasing
closeness to the Communists, she remained attached to the social circle around the IWW headquarters and local branch. She attended socials and picnics, and attended educational meetings although she was no longer invited to speak.
Young Industrial Worker editor and organizer Fred W. Thompson, who also was a Socialist
Party member, got to know her and admire her despite their political
difference. Fred, who was my friend and mentor in the IWW, spoke of her
fondly and much later helped Carolyn
Ashbaugh research her ground-breaking biography, Lucy Parsons: American
Revolutionary and shepherded it to print by the old Socialist publisher Charles H. Kerr & Co. Ashbaugh’s book was recently reissued by Haymarket
Books.
Although records have never been
found, some historians believe that Parson’s finally officially joined the
Communist Party in 1939 after years of
resisting putting herself under rigorous party discipline. Others are
not so sure. When she died the Daily Worker’s extensive
and laudatory obituary failed to claim her as a member.
Her death was particularly tragic and
horrifying. She burned to death
along with her mentally disabled adult
son in a fire at her house in
the Avondale neighborhood of
Chicago’s Northwest Side on March 7,
1942 at the presumed age of 89. She was by then nearly blind.
In a final indignity, her irreplaceable
library of over 1,500 volumes of
labor and anarchist books along with
all of her personal papers and
memorabilia of her long career
which had survived the fire with
only minor damage, was seized by Chicago police and immediately destroyed.
Lucy was laid to rest near her husband and the Haymarket Martyrs
monument. A few feet away the ashes of
Emma Goldman rest beneath another stone and she is surrounded by generations
of unionists and radicals. Others like Joe Hill have had all or part of their ashes scattered there.
The site of the house she died in now lies beneath the Kennedy Expressway. Almost as if the city was still trying to expunge her from memory.
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