Image by lisellefae on Pixabay · Pixabay License
Lucy Parsons
Sign in to saveAlso known as Lucy González Parsons, Lucy Gonzalez Parsons, Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons, Lucy Eldine Parsons, Lucy Eldine González Parsons, Lucia González, Lucia González Parsons
American communist anarchist labor organizer (1853–1942)
OverviewAI-generated
Lucy Parsons was an American journalist, trade unionist, anarchist, and communist. Born in Virginia, she was of African American ethnicity and spoke English. Her political ideologies included anarchism, social anarchism, and anarcho-communism. She was an atheist. Parsons was married to Albert Parsons.
She authored five works, including *Life of Albert R. Parsons with Brief History of the Labor Movement in America*, *Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court*, and *The principles of anarchism*. Her writings also included *Twenty-fifth anniversary, eleventh of November, memorial edition* and *Farligere end 1000 oprørere*.
Parsons died in Chicago on March 7, 1942. Her death was accidental, caused by a conflagration. She is buried at Forest Home Cemetery near the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument.
Synthesized by Vinony from 32 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Wikiquote, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- c. 1853
- Died
- 7 March 1942
- Works
- 5
Top works
- Twenty-fifth anniversary, eleventh of November, memorial edition
- Twenty-fifth anniversary, eleventh of November, memorial edition. Souvenier ed. of the famous speeches of our martyrs delivered in court when asked if they had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon them, Oct. 7, 8, and 9, 1886. Nov. 11 1887-1912
- Life of Albert R. Parsons with Brief History of the Labor Movement in America
- Farligere end 1000 oprørere
- Famous Speeches of the Eight Chicago Anarchists in Court
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 2
- Total plays
- 5
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Lucy+Parsons">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- A New Equation to Estimate Glomerular Filtration Rate
· 2009 · cited 22,563x
- Welcome to the Tidyverse
· 2019 · cited 20,404x
- Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
· 2001 · cited 18,608x
- ROBINS-I: a tool for assessing risk of bias in non-randomised studies of interventions
· 2016 · cited 15,406x
- Signatures of mutational processes in human cancer
· 2013 · cited 8,801x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.”
- “Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
- “We judge from experience that man is a gregarious animal, and instinctively affiliates with his kind co-operates, unites in groups, works to better advantage, combined with his fellow men than when alone. This would point to the formation of co-operative communities, of which our present trades-unions are embryonic patterns.”
- “People have become so used to seeing the evidences of authority on every hand that most of them honestly believe that they would go utterly to the bad if it were not for the policeman's club or the soldier's bayonet. But the anarchist says, "Remove these evidence of brute force, and let man feel the revivifying influences of self responsibility and self control, and see how we will respond to these better influences."”
- “Men are to a great extent creatures of habit, and grow to love associations; under reasonably good conditions, he would remain where he commences, if he wished to, and, if he did not, who has any natural right to force him into relations distasteful to him? Under the present order of affairs, persons do unite with societies and remain good, disinterested members for life, where the right to retire is always conceded.”
- “We have laws, jails, courts, armies, guns and armories enough to make saints of us all, if they were the true preventives of crime; but we know they do not prevent crime; that wickedness and depravity exist in spite of them, nay, increase as the struggle between classes grows fiercer, wealth greater and more powerful and poverty more gaunt and desperate.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
Key facts
- Born
- c. 1851 , Texas or Virginia , US
- Died
- ( 1942-03-07 ) March 7, 1942 (aged c. 91 ), Chicago , Illinois, US
- Other names
- Carter Diaz Gonzalez Hull
- Occupations
- Labor organizer Author Speaker Newspaper editor
- Years active
- 1870s–1940s
- Movement
- Social anarchism Anarcho-communism
- Partners
- Oliver Benton Albert Parsons Martin Lacher George Markstall
- Children
- 2 or 3
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Family name
- Parsons
- Gender
- female
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Virginia
- Place of death
- Chicago
- Occupation
- anarchist
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Religion
- atheism
- Image
- Lucy Parsons.1920.jpg
- Political ideology
- anarcho-communism
Show 8 more facts
- date of death
- 1942-03-07
- Commons category
- Lucy Parsons
- date of birth
- 1851-00-00
- place of burial
- Haymarket Martyrs' Monument
- Commons gallery
- Lucy Parsons
- manner of death
- accidental death
- cause of death
- conflagration
- ethnic group
- African Americans
via Wikidata · CC0
~32 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Lucy E. Parsons (c. 1851 – March 7, 1942) was an American social anarchist and later anarcho-communist, well known throughout her long life for her fiery speeches and writings. She was a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. There are different versions of Parsons' early life: she herself said she was of mixed Mexican and Native American ancestry; historians believe she was born to an African-American slave, possibly in Virginia, then perhaps married a black freedman in Texas. She met the activist Albert Parsons in Waco, Texas, and claimed to have married him although no records have been found. They moved to Chicago together in late 1873 and her ideology was shaped by the harsh repression of workers in the Chicago railroad strike of 1877. She argued for labor organization and class struggle, writing polemical texts and speaking at events. She joined the Workingmen's Party of the United States and later the Knights of Labor, and she set up the Chicago Working Women's Union with her friend Lizzie Swank and other women.
Parsons had two children and worked in Chicago as a seamstress, later opening her own shop. After her husband was executed in 1887 following his conviction for being a ringleader in the Haymarket affair, she became internationally famous as an anarchist speaker, touring frequently across the United States and visiting England. She wrote articles and edited radical newspapers. She was helped financially by the Pioneer Aid and Support Association and wrote the biography The Life of Albert R. Parsons with her young lover Martin Lacher. In the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution, Parsons moved towards communism. The Chicago police regarded her as a dangerous political figure and attempted many times to stop her from speaking publicly. She continued her activism as she grew older, clashing with the anarchist Emma Goldman over their differing attitudes to free love and supporting challenges to miscarriages of justice in the cases of Angelo Herndon, Tom Mooney, and the Scottsboro Boys. She died in a house fire on March 7, 1942. Her partner George Markstall returned to find the building on fire and was unable to rescue her; he died the following day. She was buried in the German Waldheim Cemetery, where the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument stands. After her death, Parsons was primarily referenced as the wife of Albert Parsons, until recent scholarship and two book-length biographies have commemorated her own achievements. The Chicago Park District named a park on Belmont Avenue after her in 2004.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Lucy Parsons” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.