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 ramped that interest even higher. The book, based on new research and
discoveries, challenged the commonly accepted story of her origins with mixed
Mexican, Native American, and mulatto Texas roots and identified 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, 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 staggering 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
crowded 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 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 blackballed 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 principal 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 were able
to be at the event. None-the-less
when a bomb went off amid charging police Albert was among the anarchists sought by the cops. 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 led 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 left 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 pothole 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 differences. 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 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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