Lucy Eldine Parsons

Lucy (or Lucia) Eldine Gonzalez was born around 1853 in Texas, likely as a slave, to parents of Native American, Black American and Mexican ancestry. Died: March 7, 1942 in a house fire; she couldn't escape due to blindness

Husband: m. 1871 Albert Richard Parsons June 20, 1848- November 11, 1887 (death by hanging)

She married Albert Parsons, a former Confederate soldier, and both were forced to flee from Texas north to Chicago by intolerant reactions to their interracial marriage, which may have been illegal due to laws prohibiting interracial marriage at the time.

Described by the Chicago Police Department as "more dangerous than a thousand rioters" in the 1920s, Parsons and her husband had become highly effective anarchist organizers primarily involved in the labor movement in the late 19th century, but also participating in revolutionary activism on behalf of political prisoners, people of color, the homeless and women. She began writing for The Socialist and The Alarm, the journal of the International Working People's Association (IWPA) which she and Parsons, among others, founded in 1883. In 1886 her husband, who had been heavily involved in campaigning for the eight hour day, was arrested, tried and executed on November 11, 1887, by the state of Illinois on charges that he had conspired in the Haymarket Riot – an event which was widely regarded as a political frame-up, and which marked the beginning of May Day labor rallies in protest.

In 1892 she briefly published Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly, and was often arrested for giving public speeches or distributing anarchist literature. While she continued championing the anarchist cause, she came into ideological conflict with some of her contemporaries, including Emma Goldman, over her focus on class politics over gender and sexual struggles.

In 1905 she participated in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, and began editing the Liberator, an anarchist newspaper that supported the IWW in Chicago. Lucy's focus shifted somewhat to class struggles around poverty and unemployment, and she organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915, which pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Jane Addams' Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration on February 12. Parsons was also quoted as saying, "My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production." Parsons anticipated the sit-down strikes in the US and, later, workers' factory takeovers in Argentina.

In 1925 she began working with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense in 1927, a communist-led organization that defended labor activists and unjustly-accused African Americans such as the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon. While it is commonly accepted by nearly all biographical accounts (including those of the Lucy Parsons Center, the IWW, and Joe Knowles) that Parsons joined the Communist Party in 1939, there is some dispute, notably in Gale Ahrens' essay "Lucy Parsons: Mystery Revolutionist, More Dangerous Than A Thousand Rioters", which can be found in the anthology Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. Ahrens also points out, in "Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878 - 1937", that the obituary which the Communist Party had published on her death made no claim that she had been a member.

Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Parsons
• http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/
• http://lucyparsons.org/biography-iww.php

See also

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/socialism/p/lucy_parsons.htm

Lucy Parsons was probably born in Texas around 1853 or 1954. According to her entry in the 1900 US Census for Chicago, her father was born in Texas and her mother in Mexico. Her antecedents are unclear; I have found no evidence for her parents' names. Her skin was dark, suggesting mixed heritage, and contemporary newspaper accounts often identified her as a Negro, whereas she insisted that her coloration was the result of Mexican and Native American ancestry. Wikipedia states that her heritage included ancestors from all three groups and, along with other sources, raises the possibility that she may have been born a slave. Her habit of providing inconsistent information about her maiden name also added to the mystery of her true origins. The Illinois Birth Certificates Index entries for her children indicate that she provided different maiden names for each: her son's birth certificate identifies her maiden name as Lucy E. Carter, while that for her daughter names her as Lucy Ella Hall. Her inconsistency leaves all such documentary evidence in doubt; the maiden name I used here is based on the name provided on Wikipedia, but this may not be her true maiden name.

Note A number of trees on Ancestry give her maiden name as Waller, but I have found no documentary evidence for this. (Lloyd-391 17:10, 3 November 2014 (EST))Although no documents confirming this are available, Lucy and her husband Albert claimed to have married in 1871 in Austin, Texas. Escaping the prejudice aroused by their interracial marriage, the couple moved from Texas to Chicago in 1873, where Albert worked for the

• Reference: WikiTree Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jul 11 2018, 22:29:09 UTC