Lucy Gonzales Parsons was a powerful writer and speaker, a life-long crusader for justice, and strikingly beautiful, but her ideas, actions or likeness have not graced school texts or Hollywood movies. She began life with many strikes against her: born a slave in Texas in 1853, she was of African, Indian and Hispanic descent, remained poor, a hard worker, and devoted to revolutionary causes -- the emancipation of women and the world’s oppressed -- until her death in 1942.

In Albert Parsons, a handsome former Confederate soldier, she found a loving husband and soul mate in a south that legally denied the right of interracial marraige. He championed racial equality and challenged the Ku Klux Klan through his newspaper, the Waco Spectator where Lucy probably began her career as an agitator. The Parsons soon left Texas for Chicago where they threw themselves into America’s burgeoning trade union movement. As militant socialists they embraced a defiant anarchist ideology of direct action against the city’s industrial and banking elite.

In 1886, and though he had finished speaking and had left the area before the tragedy, Albert was framed by the state of Illinois and sentenced to death for his alleged role in a Haymarket Square bombing that killed eight city policemen. His real crime was being a dynamic, respected and revolutionary unionist at a moment when Chicago’s captains of industry feared labor’s mounting clamor for the eight-hour day. Parson and three other outspoken union leaders were executed even as Lucy fought vainly for the right to be present.

Albert’s death did not slow down Lucy Parsons: she brought up their two children and launched her own career as an anarchist agitator, revolutionary voice and communist. A prolific writer, editor and speaker, she became a venerated figure among radicals and militant unionists and was arrested many times protesting social injustice. In 1905 she was one of only two women present and honored (the other was the legendary "Mother" Mary Jones) among the 200 men at the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW].

The Industrial Workers of the World [IWW]

The IWW aimed to knit together industrial workers of both sexes and of every race, color and creed to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a workers’ state. The American Federation of Labor, the most powerful labor organization of the time, sought to enroll skilled white male workers and largely ignored those men and women who labored in mining, factories, steel and other mass production industries. The IWW vigorously sought to recruit women, people of color, immigrants, unskilled and semi-skilled workers in the country’s mass production industries. In a triumphant capitalist United States, the IWW had chosen to walk a dangerous path into the center of corporate power dominating state and national politics.

At the 1905 founding convention Mother Jones just listened, but Lucy Parsons twice addressed the delegates on issues close to her heart -- the oppression of women and how to develop radical new tactics to win industrial conflicts. Her idea of non-violent resistance, in advance of her time, flowered during labor’s "sit-in" strikes of the 1930s, and the nonviolent civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Her words still resonate. Delegate applause interrupted her speech several times and at the end.

Lucy Parsons Addresses the IWW Convention

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 an 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. I thank you.*

Lucy Parsons continued to battle economic and racial oppression, and champion the cause of working women and men. Admired and loved by working people who heard her voice and read her publications, she was despised by the wealthy and powerful who dreaded her message.

In 1942 Parsons died when a mysterous fire raced through her home. By the time friends arrived the Chicago police and the FBI had carted off her manuscripts, papers, and books. They were never returned.

Lucy Parsons’ life, ideas and words have earned an honored place in history.