An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 12/9/2020
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"Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth."
Lucy Parsons was born under the slave name Lucia Taliaferro, in 1851 Virginia, but after Emancipation married a Texan Confederate soldier (and a Radical Republican), Albert Parsons. In the wake of public reaction to an interracial marriage, the couple fled to Chicago. Later, in 1886, both led an industrial strike pushing for (imagine!) an eight-hour work day. Unfortunately in the ensuing drama they were accused of a bomb plot that killed eight Chicago police officers (look up "Haymarket Riot" for a truly fascinating sidebar). Albert was executed for his involvement, but Lucy didn't let that stop her; she continued her activism until her husband was pardoned posthumously by the governor.
Lucy was one of only two women among the 200 men at the founding convention of what would become the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and was the only woman to speak to the assembly. Her oratory skills catapulted her to greater and greater prominence in the labor movement, though bringing her into ideological conflict with her contemporary, Emma Goldman. Significantly and somewhat paradoxically, Parsons was opposed to womens' suffrage.
One of her last major speeches was before striking employees of the powerful International Harvester corporation in February 1941. After her death in a house fire in 1942, the FBI confiscated Lucy's entire library of more than 1,5000 books on sex, socialism, and anarchy.
Perhaps, in one way, her most fitting epitaph comes from the Chicago Police Department: "More dangerous than a thousand rioters."
Read and learn more at: https://notevenpast.org/goddess-of-anarchy-lucy-parsons-american-radical/
Visit the Lucy Parsons Center in Jamaica Plain, MA: http://lucyparsons.org/
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