Feminist to Know: Lucy Parsons
Lucy Parsons was an anarchist labor organizer who wrote about and spoke out against labor issues, lynchings, and the system of debt slavery that continued after enslavement formally ended. She was born into slavery in 1851, serving on a plantation in Texas after her enslaver moved there from Virginia to avoid the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation.
After becoming free, she eventually married Albert Parsons, a white Republican and former Confederate soldier who had become a strong voice in the abolition and labor movements. The two were married during a window where interracial marriages were legal, though they faced backlash in Texas, and relocated to Chicago in 1873 to continue their organizing.
Lucy and Albert Parsons quickly became known figures in the socialist labor movement work in Chicago. However, after the Haymarket Square Riot of 1886, Albert Parsons was arrested along with a number of other labor activists on trumped-up charges of involvement with the riot. He was executed by the state for the crime.
After Albert’s death, Lucy became an even more prominent radical labor organizer. She went on to be described as “more dangerous than a thousand rioters” by the Chicago police department and by scholars as a “kind of demure, fashionable lady engaging in really some really raw rhetoric about the workers’ struggle against capitalism.”
In 1905, Parsons founded The Liberator, a publication that focused on labor issues, industrial unionism, racial justice, and the many specific issues at their intersection, like Black peonage. In the same year, she was also the only woman to address the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) founding convention.
Parsons was an active public speaker into her late 80s. She died in 1942 at the age of 91 in a house fire in her community living area.