Lucy Parsons

For almost 70 years, Lucy Parsons fought for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised in the face of an increasingly oppressive industrial economic system. Her radical activism challenged the racist and sexist sentiment in a time when it was assumed that women were biologically determined to stay at home barefoot and pregnant. This division of labour isn’t biologically wired, it’s an invention of capitalism.

While she is usually remembered in relation to the events surrounding her husband, Albert Parsons, and the executions of the Haymarket Martyrs, Lucy’s own legacy and passions have a long and courageous life history all their own. The Chicago police labeled her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”

Of African-, Native- and Mexican-American heritage, she was born in Texas in 1859, and possibly a slave.

Around 1870 she met Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier and married him in about 1872. Forced to flee Texas because of their ‘mixed marriage’, they settled in Chicago in 1873 and became heavily involved in the revolutionary elements of the labor movement.

In 1877 Lucy Parsons opened a dress shop after her husband was blacklisted from the printing trade. She began writing articles about the homeless and unemployed, Civil War veterans, and working women for The Socialist in 1878,

Lucy made her living as a dress maker, spending the remainder of her time raising her 2 children and constantly working on behalf of a plethora of social justice causes. She dedicated herself to the struggles of African-Americans, as in the case of the Scottsboro Eight in Alabama, and wrote articles condemning lynchings in the south.

Her Later Work
.Her later work included defense of other anarchists and labour activists on trial for false charges, such as Sacco and Vanzetti and Tom Mooney and Warren Billings.

Lucy spent her later years working with the International Labor Defense, a broad-based prisoners’ support group

By 1890 the labour movement, with which Lucy and Albert had been heavily involved, witnessed major defeats due to the increased technology and the industrial scale of the workplace. With these new parameters to the struggle, Lucy saw the importance of an international scope to the movement and in 1891 began editing Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly, in which she described major labour struggles of 1892, such the Carnegie steel mills in Pennsylvania and the silver mines of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

The 1890′s witnessed the formation of a major rift with Emma Goldman over the more abstract arguments that anarchist papers carried at the time. Most of these anarchist debates pivoted around the issue of free love. Lucy criticised anarchist papers for carrying articles attacking these institutions which she felt to be low in importance when compared with directly working against capitalist oppression. This attitude alienated her from other anarchist leaders.

After a major shift towards industrial unionism, in 1905 Lucy began editing The Liberator, a paper published by the IWW and based in Chicago.

Through this medium, she took her stand on other womens’ issues, supporting a woman’s right to divorce, remarry, and have access to birth control.

From 1907-1908, a period encompassing huge economic crashes, Lucy organised against hunger and unemployment. The success of her Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915 pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Jane Addam’s Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12. Two weeks after this demonstration, the government began planning for a decentralisation of hunger and unemployment policy.

In 1925 Lucy began working with the newly formed Communist Party. Though she didn’t officially join until 1939, she held an affinity with the party, seeing them work toward revolution from a perspective of class consciousness.

At this point, after major conflicts with the new directions of the anarchist movement and watching its momentum slow, Lucy felt that the anarchist movement had no future as it no longer actively moved the people toward revolution.

Dangerous even after death
Even with her eyesight failing, Lucy Parsons was active in the fight against oppression until her death. Continuing to inspire crowds, she spoke at the International Harvester in February 1941, one of her last major appearances. An accidental fire killed her on March 7, 1942 at the age of 89. Her partner, George Markstall, died the next day from imjuries he received while trying to save her.

To add to this tragedy, Lucy’s library of 1,500 books on sex, socialism and anarchy were mysteriously stolen, along with all of her personal papers. Neither the FBI nor the Chicago police revealed that the FBI had already confiscated all of her books.

The struggle for fundamental freedom of speech, in which Lucy had engaged throughout her life, continued through her death as authorities still tried to silence this radical woman by robbing her of the work of her lifetime.

Though she affiliated herself with many different groups throughout her lifetime, Lucy Parsons’ strong politics and beliefs remained distinctly individual and uncompromising.

She never sought less than revolution to change the oppressive capitalist system surrounding her. Working with a clear focus from a perspective of class consciousness, Lucy fought with the workers first, seeing issues of sex and race as intertwined with the larger struggle.

Because she was a woman of action and strong words, the establishment tried to repress her individual voice, often relegating her to merely the role of a bereaved widow. Yet the legacy of her seventy years of fighting stay to inspire us today.