Review, Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1878-1937. Edited and introduced by Gale Ahrens. Afterword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2003)

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 2006

When Chicago’s Park District Board named a vest-pocket park on the city’s northwest side after Lucy Parsons in 2004, the local police union vigorously protested. After all, police representatives argued, Parsons had been a life-long agitator, widow of the executed Haymarket anarchist Albert Parsons, who had herself advocated in her 1884 speech “To Tramps” that oppressed workers “Learn the use of explosives!” Parsons, no doubt, would be pleased to know that, more than sixty years after her death in 1942, she still can rattle the cages of the forces of social order.

Parsons’ place in the history of American radicalism usually focuses on her connection to the 1886 Haymarket Square bombing and subsequent trial, in which her husband, Albert, was one of eight anarchist labor leaders convicted of murder and one of four eventually executed for the crime. But as this valuable anthology demonstrates, Lucy Parsons’ career extended far beyond a single entry on the historical stage. In the decade before the Haymarket Affair, she already had established herself as a leading figure in Chicago’s labor movement, having been one of the founders of the Working Women’s Union in 1879, a pioneering effort at organizing women workers. And for a half-century after Albert’s hanging, Lucy continued to educate and agitate for the rights of labor, women, African Americans, and the dispossessed.

Much about Lucy’s early life is unknown, but it is likely that she was born a slave in Texas around 1853, of mixed black, Mexican, and Indian ancestry. In the early 1870s she married Albert Parsons, a printer and former Confederate soldier who had become a Radical Republican, and, a few years later, the two relocated to Chicago where they became involved in the city’s labor movement. The two moved steadily leftward in their politics, from reformism to anarchism, and in 1883 they helped found the International Working People’s Association and the next year Albert began publishing and editing the labor paper Alarm, to which Lucy contributed regularly. The Parsonses and other Chicago anarchists played a major role in organizing the original May Day demonstration on May 1, 1886, in which more than 100,000 workers demonstrated for an eight-hour workday, which was the context in which the Haymarket tragedy played out when the bomb exploded three days later.

After Albert’s death, Lucy continued to speak on a broad range of issues, drawing connections between the rights of workers, women (including the right to birth control), children, and racial minorities. In more than sixty years of radical organizing and agitating, Parsons associated with a wide variety of organizations and yet, as this collection shows, there remained a strong element of consistency in her thinking. Throughout her career she believed in the right of the oppressed to armed self-defense, advocating, for instance, that African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South fight back against white violence. “You are not absolutely defenseless,” she urged. “For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.”

Of all the groups with which Parsons associated, the one that was closest to her heart was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In Parsons’ speech to the 1905 founding convention of the IWW, included in this collection, she identified herself as speaking for the exploited child and women laborers (including, she specified, prostitutes) and urged the new labor organization to truly represent the entire working class. Parsons remained a strong supporter of the “Wobblies,” though she was not afraid to take the union to task for what she saw as its shortcomings. Writing a year after the founding convention, she complained, “the IWW cannot hope to gain and hold the confidence of the wage class long if it has no definite aim in view looking to a lasting betterment of economic conditions.”

Throughout her life Parsons continued to discuss the legacy of the Haymarket Affair. Decades after the martyrs’ executions, she sought to educate a younger generation of labor activists that many of the reforms they took for granted had been the result of the efforts of Albert and his comrades in the Chicago anarchist movement. “Does this generation know” she asked in 1926, “that those who inaugurated the eight-hour day were put to death at the command of capital?” Parsons also publicly defended labor activists and other radicals in later well-publicized court cases, including the 1907 murder trial of William Haywood and other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, which she compared to the Haymarket trial. “In the Anarchists’ case it as the eight-hour movement to be suppressed; in the Haywood case it was the Western Federation of Miners [business interests] were after, and they wanted to make an example of its leaders.”

This book provides a good introduction to an often neglected figure in the history of the American left, and Gale Ahrens’s introduction and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s afterword admirably set the context for understanding Parsons’ writings. The major shortcoming with this collection is the absence of Parsons’ most famous (or infamous) speech, “To Tramps,” in which she forcefully advocated dynamite as a weapon in the class struggle. This omission is especially glaring given the fact that both Ahrens and Dunbar-Ortiz discuss the speech at some length.