Lucy Parsons: The Woman Chicago Police Wanted Silent

Chicago’s police department spent decades trying to keep Lucy Parsons off a stage, and lost most of the rounds. They arrested her, closed halls that booked her, and told the press flatly that she would not be allowed to speak in the city, and she kept organizing there anyway into her eighties. She organized labor’s poor and unemployed from the 1870s until a house fire killed her in 1942, and for most of that time the record shows a police department that treated her talking in public as a problem to be solved.

A childhood she told several different ways

Almost nothing about Lucy Parsons’s early life is settled, including by her own account. The most credible modern biography, Jacqueline Jones’s Goddess of Anarchy, concludes she was born enslaved around 1851, likely in Virginia, to an enslaved mother. The Texas State Historical Association’s biography traces her to an enslaver named Dr. Thomas J. Taliaferro, who moved the family to McLennan County, Texas during the Civil War; after the war her mother, Charlotte, married a freedman named Charlie Carter, and the children took his name. Lucy worked as a seamstress and domestic servant in Waco as a young woman.

None of that is how Lucy Parsons told it. For most of her adult life she told reporters, census takers, and audiences that she was Mexican and Native American, and she denied having any Black ancestry at all, a claim her light skin made possible to sustain in public. Historians disagree about why: self-protection in a country that lynched Black radicals, a genuine belief about her own parentage, or both. The honest answer is that the record holds two different women, the one biographers have reconstructed from Texas court and census documents and the one Parsons insisted on being called, and neither account fully displaces the other.

Texas, then Chicago

Lucy married Albert Parsons, a white former Confederate soldier who had become a Reconstruction-era Republican newspaperman, in September 1872. No marriage record has surfaced; interracial couples in Texas in this period faced both legal risk and mob violence, and by 1873 the two had left for Chicago, where Albert found work as a typesetter and Lucy took in sewing. When the railroad strikes of 1877 spread to Chicago and Albert was blacklisted from print shops for his sympathies, Lucy opened her own dress shop to support the family and helped found the Working Women’s Union, organizing seamstresses and domestic workers around equal pay and suffrage.

Haymarket

By 1886 both Parsonses were prominent voices in Chicago’s anarchist movement, campaigning for the eight-hour workday. On May 1 they marched at the head of a crowd estimated at 80,000. Three days later, on May 4, someone threw a bomb into a police line breaking up a rally at Haymarket Square, killing an officer; the ensuing gunfire killed several more people, officers and civilians both. Albert and seven other men were tried for conspiracy to murder. No evidence at trial tied any of the eight to making or throwing the bomb; a jury convicted all of them anyway. (The full history of that week and the movement it created is at causes/may-day.)

Albert was hanged on November 11, 1887, alongside three co-defendants. That morning, Lucy brought their two children, Albert Jr. and Lulu, to the jail for a last visit. Police cordoning the building turned them away, then arrested all three and held them, stripped, in a cell until the execution was over.

Speaking anyway

Widowed at around thirty-six with two children, Parsons spent the following years touring and fundraising for the Haymarket defense, then built her own career as a writer and organizer that outlasted the movement that made her famous. She edited two anarchist papers of her own, Freedom in the early 1890s and later The Liberator, and kept speaking in halls across the country. Chicago’s police made a standing project of stopping her. By one detailed account of her decades under surveillance, for virtually the entirety of the last forty years of her life the department tried to bar her from making any public speech at all. The line most often attached to her, that police called her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters,” appears in dozens of later tributes and articles, but no one citing it has produced the police document, memo, or dated report it supposedly comes from. What the record does show, with names and dates attached, is arrest after arrest and hall after canceled hall, for most of her adult life.

The department’s most public defeat came in January 1915. With Chicago’s unemployment rate spiking that winter, Parsons helped lead a march of the city’s jobless demanding relief; police arrested roughly twenty marchers, Parsons among them. Jane Addams, the Hull House reformer with little else in common with Parsons politically, posted her bail. Within weeks the city had announced relief jobs, soup kitchens, and shelters.

The only woman on the floor

On June 27, 1905, Parsons was in Chicago for the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, alongside Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, and Big Bill Haywood. (The convention itself, and who else was in the room, is covered at causes/iww and figures/big-bill-haywood.) She was one of only two women among roughly two hundred delegates, and by multiple later accounts the only one who addressed the floor. Speaking from the convention proceedings, she told the assembled unionists that working women were worse off than working men:

We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.

She went on to argue for a tactic that would not become common practice for another three decades:

My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out an [sic] starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production… .

The sit-down strikes that made her idea famous, most notably the Flint sit-down strike of 1936-37, were still thirty years away.

The last organizing

Parsons kept working into old age. By the 1920s she was active in the International Labor Defense, the Communist-aligned legal aid group that raised money and public pressure for radicals facing prosecution, and was elected to its executive committee in 1927. She had described herself as connected to the Communist Party for years before that; her biographer Carolyn Ashbaugh, drawing on interviews with people who knew her, concluded that she formally joined the party in 1939, three years before she died.

The fire

Parsons died at around ninety-one on March 7, 1942, when her house in Chicago caught fire. Her longtime companion, George Markstall, tried and failed to get her out; he died of his own injuries the next day. Within days, Chicago police searched the wreckage and took what was left of her library, several thousand books and papers on socialism, anarchism, and labor history that she had assembled across a lifetime, and turned custody of it over to the FBI. It was never catalogued publicly, never returned to her comrades who asked for it, and its whereabouts, if any of it survives, are unknown.

They never managed to keep her off a stage while she was alive. The week she died, they finally found a way: they walked into the wreckage and took the argument before anyone else could read it.