Note: Interest
in the long life of labor agitator and anarchist 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. Now a new
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.
Interesting. I have not yet read
Jones’s new book, but it is at the top of my must-read pile. The Social Justice Team at my Tree of Life
Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois is planning to sponsor
a group read and discussion of the book later this year. Meantime I am resurrecting this 2015 post
about Lucy, but be aware that it reflects an earlier understanding of her
origins.
 |
| Jacqueline Jones's new biography breaks new ground in identifying Lucy Parsons's origins. |
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
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.”
 |
| IWW artist Carlos Cortez reflected the ethnic pride of many Mexican-Americans in Lucy Parson's claim of Hispanic origins in the 1986 Spanish Language lino-cut poster created for the centennial of the Haymarket Affair. |
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.
 |
| Former Confederate soldier turned Texas Reconstruction Radical Republican turned Chicago anarchist labor leader Albert Parsons did cut a dashing figure and together they made a stunning couple as they moved together to the forefront of the workers' movement in the city. |
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 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 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.
 |
| Four Haymarket Martyrs including Albert Parsons went to the gallows at Cook County Jail while Lucy was held naked in cell to prevent her attendance. |
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.
 |
| From the Official Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the IWW. Lucy Parsons is listed as an aye vote to establish the union. |
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.
 |
| Lucy Parson's mug shot after her arrest for leading the 1915 march of the unemployed in Chicago. |
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 it 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
.
 |
| The recent Haymarket Books reissue of Carolyn Ashbaugh's 1977 biography. |
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
disables 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 paper and memorabilia
of her long career which had survived
the fire with only minor damage,
was seized by Chicago police and immediately destroyed.
 |
| This simple stone marks the ashes of Lucy Parsons near the Haymarket Memorial and the remains of her husband and other Haymarket Martyrs. They are all surrounded by scores of anarchist, socialist, Communist, and labor activists including Lucy's rival Emma Goldman. |
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.
