Information About ™Lucy Parsons |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT LUCY PARSONS | |
| 1853 births | |
| 1942 deaths | |
| african americans | |
| american anarchists | |
| american labor leaders | |
| industrial workers of the world leaders | |
| people from chicago | |
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Lucy Parsons ( 1853 - March 7 , 1942 ) was an American Radical Labor organizer, Anarchist 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, stressing her Mexican heritage. In 1871 she married Republican Albert Parsons , a former Confederate soldier, and both were forced to flee from Texas north to Chicago because of the intolerance caused by 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. For ten years until that point, she had been a member of the Knights Of Labor , which condemned the Haymarket defendants. 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. Most biographical works on Lucy Parsons erroneously claim that she joined the Communist Party in 1939 . All of these sources derive their claim from Carolyn Ashbaugh's biography of Parsons which makes the claim without offering any proof. The claim was conclusively disproven by Gale Ahrens in her essay "Lucy Parsons: Mystery Revolutionist, More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters." The essay can be found in the recently published book, edited by Ahrens, "Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, Solidarity" which also includes many of Lucy's most important writings. Furthermore, in a letter dated February 27, 1934, Parsons explains that she chose to work with the ILD only due to the lack of a coherent anarchist movement at the time and not out of any ideological or organizational change of heart (the letter can be found in the Ahrens book mentioned above.) 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. SELECTED COVERAGE IN THE ''NEW YORK TIMES''
REFERENCES ''Wobblies! A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World''. Buhle, Paul and Schulman, Nicole, eds. Verso, NY, 2005. EXTERNAL LINKS
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