Lucy Parsons

Lucy E. Parsons, aka Lucy Gonzales, c1853-1942
Lucy Parsons was born in Texas, USA of African American, Native American, and Mexican descent. She became an anarchist and married the anarchist and later Haymarket Martyr Albert R. Parsons, taking his name.
An active anarchist and Industrial Workers of the World organiser for decades, she moved closer to the Communist Party in 1925, finally joining it in 1939, three years before her death.

Links on libcom.org
Biography of Lucy Parsons
Writings of Lucy Parsons
The writings of Albert Parsons
The history of the Haymarket Martyrs and Mayday
The Industrial Workers of the World, 1905-2005
Lucy Parsons search results on libcom.org

Little is known about the early life of Lucy Parsons. She claimed to have been born the daughter of a Mexican women, Marie del Gather and John Waller, a Creek Indian, and orphaned at age three. From there she said she was raised on a ranch in Texas by her maternal uncle. However, later research has pointed to the possibility that she was a slave in Texas.

Yet your employer told you that it was overproduction which made him close up. Who cared for the bitter tears and heart-pangs of your loving wife and helpless children, when you bid them a loving "God bless you" and turned upon the tramper's road to seek employment elsewhere? I say, who cared for those heartaches and pains? You were only a tramp now, to be execrated and denounced as a "worthless tramp and a vagrant" by that very class who had been engaged all those years in robbing you and yours...

An article by Lucy E. Parsons in anarchist magazine Alarm, October 4, 1884. Also printed and distributed as a leaflet by the International Working People's Association.

Several short news and comment articles written by Lucy E. Parsons in the US radical, anarchist and workers' press.

A lecture by Lucy Parsons, in which she outlines her views on anarchism.

Lucy Parsons addressed the founding convention [of the Industrial Workers of the World revolutionary union] on two occasions and her speeches touched on issues close to her heart: the oppression of women and how to develop radical new tactics to win strikes. Her ideas clearly were in advance of the time, presage the "sit-in" strikes of the 1930s, the anti-war movement of the 1960s, and her words resonate today. Delegate applause interrupted her speech several times and at the end.