Although the early years of Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons are
shrouded in mystery, the historical record revealed that she came from
African America, Native American, and Mexican ancestry,.the daughter of John Waller, a Muscogee, and Marie del Gather from Mexico.Parsons Her parents died when she was a child and was raised by relatives.
Since she was
born in Texas around 1853, her parents were probably slaves. Lucy
quickly learned to function in her prejudiced society by using different
names. Often giving Lucy Gonzales as her name, she used her Mexican
ancestry to explain her dark skin tone instead of acknowledging her
African American roots.
While
Lucy was living with Oliver Gathings, a former slave, she met Albert
Parsons.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, on June 24, 1848, Albert Parsons was
one of ten children of the owner of a shoe and leather factory. Both of
his parents died when he was just five years old and Albert’s older
brother William and Esther, a slave, helped raise him in Texas. After he
attended school for about a year, Albert went to work as an apprentice
at the Galveston Daily News. While still a teenager, Albert served in the Confederate Army including a stint in Parson’s Mounted Volunteers.
After the Civil War, Albert settled in Texas, attending college at what
is now Baylor University and working on several other newspapers. He
became an activist for former slaves and a Republican overseer of
Reconstruction which earned him the admiration and respect of the former
slaves he championed and the hatred of his fellow southerners and the
Ku Klux Klan. In what seemed to him a natural crossover, he also became
interested in the rights of workers.
In 1869, Albert worked as a traveling correspondent and business agent for the Houston Daily Telegraph and
during this time he met Lucy Ella Gonzales Waller. They were married in
1872, and Lucy Parsons, a political force in her own right joined her
destiny with her political mentor and partner. Their marriage not only
produced an interesting combination of political ideas, it also
committed what southerners, especially Ku Klux Klan members, called
miscegenation.
The South enforced both legal and social laws against miscegenation or racial mixing through marriage or cohabitation. In
1872, shortly after their marriage, the Parsons left Texas because of
their political involvement and their interracial marriage. Four years
before the formal ending of Reconstruction in 1876 when all federal
troops left, the South methodically instituted restrictive Jim Crow
segregation laws. Albert worked tirelessly to register Black voters and
his enemies shot him in the leg and threatened to lynch him.
In 1873,
Albert and Lucy Parsons moved north to Chicago to what they hoped would
be a better life. Albert began work as a printer for the Chicago Times.Life
in Chicago didn’t provide a safe haven for the Parsons. They arrived in
Chicago during the Panic of 1873, a financial collapse and depression
that lingered on for years. Causes of the Panic of 1873 include post
Civil War inflation, over speculation especially in railroads, a large
trade deficit, declining bank reserves, and European economic problems
stemming from the Franco-Prussian War. Chicago and Boston also suffered
the financial losses from devastating fires, Chicago in 1871 and Boston
in 1872.
As
Albert’s tenure as a printer continued, so did the labor troubles of
the United States. A law called the Contract Labor law of 1864 permitted
American businesses to contract and bring immigrant laborers into the
country which created a surplus of unskilled workers in cities like
Chicago and lowered wages. Socialist and anarchist ideology also gained a
toe hold in the United States and began to radicalize its labor force.
After they settled in a German-immigrant community, embracing first socialism and then anarchism Albert and Lucy became Labour actiists. In 1877, the Baltimore Ohio
Railroad cut worker’s wages igniting a nationwide strike and motivating
railroad workers all over the country to join picket lines. Reaction to
the railroad strike rippled through Chicago in the summer of 1877 when Chicago railroad workers took up the cause with a vengeance, derailing an engine and baggage cars fighting sporadic battles with the police.
Motivated by the plight of striking workers, Albert embraced an activist role, taking time from his work and family life to advocate peaceful ways for workers to negotiate. Soon the small number of workers he initially addressed grew to crowds of more than 25,000 people and Albert stood at center of the Chicago anarchist movement. Lucy stood by his side both literally and figuratively.
Motivated by the plight of striking workers, Albert embraced an activist role, taking time from his work and family life to advocate peaceful ways for workers to negotiate. Soon the small number of workers he initially addressed grew to crowds of more than 25,000 people and Albert stood at center of the Chicago anarchist movement. Lucy stood by his side both literally and figuratively.
Albert and Lucy Parsons joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1876, and they were active members of the International Working People’s Association or the First International which supported racial and gender equality. Albert Parsons also became the editor of the Alarm, the anarchist weekly journal that the International Working People’s Association published.
As Albert’s labor activities and speech making increased so did his fame and eventually the Chicago Times fired
him for supporting striking workers and the printers’ unions in Chicago
black listed him. Lucy Parsons opened a dress shop to support Albert
and their two children, Albert Jr. and Lulu Eda. Like
Twentieth Century women, Lucy found herself jugging her family
responsibilities and her career. She chaired meetings for the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union with her friend Lizzie
Swank, and she began to write for several radical publications.
Both her friends and enemies considered Lucy Parsons a
more dangerous radical than Albert, because of her outspoken speeches
and writing defending the rights of poor people. She also challenged the establishment because she refused to be confined to the role of a
homemaker but expanded her resume to include militant and radical woman. The Chicago Police Department describing her 'as more dangerous than a
thousand rioters.'
Together she and Albert would
fight for African American voting rights, and against KKK terror,
condemning racist attacks and killings. Getting involved also in
radical labour organising, they fought for the rights of political
prisoners, women, people of color, and homeless people, advocating a
syndicalist theory of society.
She began writing for the radical newspapers The Socialist and The Alarm.' On the topic of the growth of homeless people
begging for food on the streets of Chicago, the Chicago tribune said '
When a tramp asks you for bread , put strychnine or arsenic on it and
he will trouble you no more, and trouble will keep out of your
neighbourhood.' In response to this depravity, Lucy wrote one of her
most famous articles called - ' To Trams, the Unemployed, the
Disinherited, and Miserable.'
On
May 1, 1886, Albert and Lucy Parsons and their two children, led 80,000
people down Michigan Avenue to support the eight hour work day, and
this parade is considered to be the first May Day parade. The
International Working Peoples Association organized a campaign for the
eight hour day and on May 1, 1886, a national strike of American workers
began in support of an eight hour day.
Over
the next few days over 340,000 male and female workers participated in
the strike with more than 25 percent of them hailing from Chicago. The
unity of the Chicago workers so surprised Chicago employers that they
granted the workers a shorter work day. Thrilled, Lucy Parsons
proclaimed that the United States was ripe for a mass worker’s
revolution.
On
May 3, 1886, police fired into a crowd of unarmed strikers at the
McCormick Harvest Works in Chicago, wounding many strikers and killing
four of them. The Radicals called a meeting for May 4, 1886, in
Haymarket Square to discuss the situation. Many versions of the story
say that the Chicago police fired on a peaceful rally and an unknown
person threw a bomb, while some modern labor historians like Timothy
Messer-Kruse argue that the anarchists had a premeditated plan and
provoked the confrontation. However it started, a riot broke out and one
officer was killed and several officers and workers were wounded.
Over
the next few days, police scoured Chicago, searching for and arresting
any anarchists and radicals they could capture. They raided homes,
offices, and meeting halls of suspected radicals and Albert Parsons had
not been in Haymarket Square that day, but the police accused him as one
of the eight men responsible for the bombing. Albert Parsons went into
hiding, moving to Waukesha, Wisconsin, and remaining there until June
21, 1886.
Both
proud and angry that Albert Parsons believed in his anarchism enough to
die for it, Lucy launched into a campaign for clemency. She toured the
United States on a speaking tour, distributing fliers and pamphlets
about the unjust arrests and trials, and raising funds to help the
defendants. Armed policemen greeted Lucy had almost every place she
visited, barring her admission to meeting halls and monitoring her
speech and actions.
As
well as outside threats, Lucy Parsons also had to fight a battle within
the labor movement. She had belonged to the Knights of Labor for over
ten years and she vehemently disagreed with Terence Powderly, the leader
of the Knights. Terence Powderly opposed strikes and often discouraged
Knights of Labor members from participating in them and he strongly
disagreed with radicalism. He believed that the government should make
an example of the Haymarket defendants and the Knights of Labor firmly
stood against the Haymarket defendants.
Despite
these setbacks, Lucy continued her speaking tour, sparking more
interest in the Haymarket case and becoming more and more famous in her
own right.
The
police kept Lucy Parsons under constant surveillance and whenever they
had the slightest suspicion she knew Albert’s whereabouts, they arrested
her. Although they never charged Lucy with conspiracy in the bombing,
the authorities did arrest and charge Oscar Neebe, Adolph Fisher, August
Spies, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden, Carl Engle, and her
husband Albert. Eventually, Albert turned himself in to stand with his
fellow defendants and they were brought to trial, even though many of
them were not even at Haymarket Square at the time of the riot.
Corporate
lawyer William Perkins Black defended the anarchists, and witnesses
testified that none of the eight defendants had thrown the bomb. The
jury found them all guilty. Oscar Neebe was sentenced to 15 years in
prison and the others drew death sentences. Samuel Fielden and Michael
Schwab asked for clemency and eventually Illinois Governor John Peter
Altgeld pardoned them and they were released from prison on June 26,
1893. Albert Parsons could have been pardoned as well, but he didn’t
petition Governor Altgeld for a pardon because he felt that asking for a
pardon meant admitting guilt and he had committed no crime.
The day before his death,Albert Parsons wrote
a letter to his two young children. Dated Dungeon No. 7, Cook County
Jail, Chicago, Illinois, November 9, 1887, the letter read:
“To my Darling, Precious Little Children Albert R. Parsons, Jr. and his sister Lulu Eda Parsons:
As I write this word, I blot your names with a tear. We will never meet again. Oh, my children, how deeply, dearly your Papa loves you. We show our love by living for our loved ones, we also prove our love by dying when necessary for them. Of my life and the course of my unnatural and cruel death, you will hear from others.
Your Father is a self-offered sacrifice upon the altar of liberty and happiness. To you I leave the legacy of an honest name and duty done.Preserve it. Emulate it. Be true to yourselves, you cannot be false to others. Be industrious, sober, and cheerful.
Your mother! She is the grandest, noblest of women. Love, honor, and obey her. My children, my precious ones, I request you to read this parting message on each recurring anniversary of my death in remembrance of him who dies not alone and for you, but for the children yet unborn. Bless you my darlings! Farewell,
Your Father,
Albert R. Parsons”
On November 10, 1887, while in his jail cell, Louis Lingg committed suicide by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth and on November 11, 1887, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher and Carl Engle were hanged..https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/11/commemorating-haymarket-martyrs.html
Lucy brought her two children. Lulu Etta and Albert Jr., to see their father one last time. The police arrested her and her children and took them to jail. They forced Lucy to strip and left her naked in a cold cell with her children while they executed her husband. When they finally released her, she vowed to continue her fight against injustice even though the authorities had killed her husband and she feared that they would kill her too.
“To my Darling, Precious Little Children Albert R. Parsons, Jr. and his sister Lulu Eda Parsons:
As I write this word, I blot your names with a tear. We will never meet again. Oh, my children, how deeply, dearly your Papa loves you. We show our love by living for our loved ones, we also prove our love by dying when necessary for them. Of my life and the course of my unnatural and cruel death, you will hear from others.
Your Father is a self-offered sacrifice upon the altar of liberty and happiness. To you I leave the legacy of an honest name and duty done.Preserve it. Emulate it. Be true to yourselves, you cannot be false to others. Be industrious, sober, and cheerful.
Your mother! She is the grandest, noblest of women. Love, honor, and obey her. My children, my precious ones, I request you to read this parting message on each recurring anniversary of my death in remembrance of him who dies not alone and for you, but for the children yet unborn. Bless you my darlings! Farewell,
Your Father,
Albert R. Parsons”
On November 10, 1887, while in his jail cell, Louis Lingg committed suicide by exploding a dynamite cap in his mouth and on November 11, 1887, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher and Carl Engle were hanged..https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/11/commemorating-haymarket-martyrs.html
Lucy brought her two children. Lulu Etta and Albert Jr., to see their father one last time. The police arrested her and her children and took them to jail. They forced Lucy to strip and left her naked in a cold cell with her children while they executed her husband. When they finally released her, she vowed to continue her fight against injustice even though the authorities had killed her husband and she feared that they would kill her too.
The immigrant workers of Chicago revered her, politicians reviled
her, and the general public maintained an intense fascination with
her, all for good reason. Parsons lived a life that was rife with
contradictions. She denied that she was of African descent, instead
claiming that her parents were Hispanic and Indian. She remained
largely indifferent to the injustices faced by black laborers, focusing
her attention on the white workers of Chicago and other big cities. In
private, she took lovers after the death of her husband, but in public
presented herself as a prim Victorian wife and mother and a
grief-stricken widow. She glorified the bonds of family, yet did not
hesitate to rid herself of her son Albert Junior when he threatened to
embarrass her by joining the U. S. army. In 1899 she had Junior
committed against his will to an insane asylum, where he died twenty
years later.
After her husbands death , Lucy came into her own as one of the leading radicals of the day.
she continued to spread her anarchist message, and became known
for her powerful oratory, urging the laboring classes to “Learn the use of explosives!”
to protect themselves from predatory industrialists and police forces.
In describing her, Parsons’s enemies often evoked the Great Chicago
Fire of 1871. She was a “firebrand” who delivered “fiery,” “red-hot,”
“incendiary,” “inflammatory” speeches that her critics feared would
spark a bloody uprising among her followers
In 1905 she participated in the founding of
the International Workers of the World, in what became known as the 'Wobblies ' She was one of two women, the other being Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2012/11/mary-harris-jones-151830-30111930.htmlwho founded the IWW. The union welcomed all
workers, regardless of nationality, religion, gender or skill, into its
ranks. she believed in their
committment to direct action, which she believed would inspire a
strong working class movement. She was a founding member of the Chicago chapter and wrote for the
organization’s paper. Drafted as a speaker at the IWW founding
convention, Lucy used this opportunity to speak to the tactics required
to end oppression and for success in strikes and outlined her vision:
“We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it, and the only way that we can be represented is to take a man to represent us. You men have made such a mess of it in representing us that we have not much confidence in asking you. …
“We [women] are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future it is to organize the women. …
“Now, what do we mean when we say revolutionary Socialist?
“We mean that the land shall belong to the landless, the tools to the toiler, and the products to the producers. … I believe that if every man and every woman who works, or who toils in the mines, mills, the workshops, the fields, the factories and the farms of our broad America should decide in their minds that they shall have that which of right belongs to them, and that no idler shall live upon their toil … then there is no army that is large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the army. …
“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. …
“Let us sink such differences as nationality, religion, politics and set our eyes eternally and forever toward the rising star of the industrial republic of labor; remembering that we have left the old behind and have set our faces toward the future. There is no power on earth that can stop men and women who are determined to be free at all hazards. There is no power on earth so great as the power of intellect. It moves the world and it moves the earth. …
“I hope even now to live to see the day when the first dawn of the new era of labor will have arisen, when capitalism will be a thing of the past, and the new industrial republic, the commonwealth of labor, shall be in operation.”
She went on to found The Liberator newspaper writing extensively in the newspaper on topics such as worker strikes, industrial conflict, and classism. Parsons believed that revolutionary social change was possible through the empowerment of labor unions. She sought to overthrow capitalism and dismantle the federal government by advocating for the creation of a new society self-managed by workers. In her writings and speeches, Parsons addressed the oppression of women and the working class, and was among the first to address lynchings and racial oppression in the South, but largely arguing that capitalism and the economic conditions were to blame. 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, nevertheless she continued to work with various Labour
groups, while raising two children that she had had with Albert.
Finding time to organise demonstrations, talking to crowds of workers,
for the unemployed, homeless and hungry delivering power passionate
speeches against police brutality, judicial murder. Getting involved in
the International Labour Defence, fighting for Sacco and Vancetti,https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2014/08/remembering-sacco-and-vanzetti-executed_23.html Tom
Mooney, Scottbro Nine, 9 young African Americans who had become symbols
of criminal injustice at the time, and for Women's emancipation, for
free birth control, advocating for organisation of sex workers,and the
struggle and rights of the poor and disenfranchised. Preaching justice
for the poor by way of revolution. Her radical beliefs prompted the
police to arrest her many times but believing in freedom of speech,
she would spend the rest of her life, fighting the forces that seeked
to eliminate her voice.
Continuing to remain active into her eighties, she died in a
suspicious house fire on the 7th of March 1942 her lover, George Markstall, died the next day from wounds he received while trying to save her. She was believed to be 89 years old. It seems she was viewed as a
threat to the political order in death, as well as in life, it was
revealed that her ashes barely being cold, the Chicago Police force
seized her entire personal library, in all it's 3,000 volumes, on sex,
socialism and anarchy and turned it over the F.B.I. Most of it would
never be seen again, an attempt to whitewash and write her out of
history as they tried to rob her of the work of her life.
Fortunately some of her writings survived, as do her ideas,
fighting strongly for what she believed in, defying both racial and
gender discrimination, at the forefronts of movements and battles for
social justice, her entire life. She challenged the racist and sexist
sentiment in a time when even Radical Americans, believed a woman's
place was in the home.Parsons' radical vision for a just society was decades ahead of her
time, making her the predecessor for so many women of color who sought
to challenge the system.
The legacy of her fight for workers rights,
freedom of speech, the African-American, is still a strong influential
one. Her voice still resounding against all kinds of oppression and the
forces of capitalism long after her death. She is buried near her husband in Waldheim Cemetery (now Forest Home Cemetery), Forest Park, Illinois.
For more information on Lucy, The Lucy Parsons Project has a wealth of links including links to Lucy's own writings.
