WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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In 1884 Parsons wrote in her well-known essay, “To Tramps”:
…can you not see that the “good boss” or the “bad boss” cuts no figure whatever? that you are the common prey of both, and that their mission is simply robbery? Can you not see that it is the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM and not the “boss” which must be changed?
Sometimes an easy way to confound one’s historical simple-mindedness is to juxtapose events and dates that often aren’t thought of together. This can help undermine a nationalist progressive narrative. For instance, Ulysses S. Grant died in 1885. His funeral in New York City was an immense spectacle, attracting a reported 1.5 million. His pallbearers included both Union and Confederate Army Generals ; Karl Marx, who reported on the US Civil War for the New York Tribune, died in London, a stateless person, in 1883, with a reported 9 to 11 mourners. One might make special note that both men died destitute.
In 1887, the year Walt Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey, Albert Parsons was hanged in Chicago for being an anarchist rather than throwing a bomb in Haymarket Square as there was no evidence that anyone on trial had anything to do with the bomb. Emma Goldman, radicalized by Haymarket, perhaps the most famous anarchist this country has known, would surely cite Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, as an essential work of anarchist ideals.
In 1872 Albert Parsons, a white man and former Confederate Army soldier, married Lucia Carter, born of an enslaved woman, in Waco, Texas. They quickly moved north to Chicago as the brief hope of Reconstruction gave way to the entrenched racism expressed in Jim Crow laws. Lucia Carter became Lucy Parsons, Goddess of Anarchy, the woman the Chicago Police claimed was more dangerous than 1,000 rioters. Chicago was bursting at the seams with anarchists though, being home to a large number of German immigrants, and was, at that time, the home of Johann Most, the popularizer of the so-called “propaganda of the deed,” violent actions intended to incite revolution. And it is here that we find dynamite; it is here, in the midst of the Gilded Age, that we find an America much like it is now, with wealth amassed in the hands of the few and the masses living in poverty. It is here that wage-slavery is the best life to be hoped for and monopoly capital rules (its ethos valorized and enshrined in a board game). And It is here where Lucy Parsons fashions her identity as one of the most eloquent and incendiary speakers of the age. In a coincidence we like to figure as fate, Lucy, Lucia, means light.
RELATED
“Learn the Use of Explosives!”: On Jacqueline Jones’s “Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” by Elaine Elinson
Street Fighting Woman by Eric Foner
The Enigmatic Anarchist: An Interview with Jacqueline Jones (Jacobin)
Works by Lucy Parsons (The Anarchist Library)
Anarchy is Intersectional: Learning from Emma Goldman (Interchange)
GUEST
Jacqueline Jones is Professor and Chair of the History Department; Ellen C. Temple Chair in Women’s History and Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History. She is the author of several books, including, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (2013). That book and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (25th Anniversary Edition, 2010) were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; Labor of Love won the Bancroft Prize for 1986.
MUSIC
“Revolution” by Nina Simone
“New Beginning” by Tracy Chapman
“There’s a New World Coming”
“Interlude: 6 Legged Griot Trio (Weariness)” by Meshell Ndegeocello
“Turiya and Ramakrishna” by Alice Coltrane
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Edited by Rob Schoon
Music by Bryce Martin
Executive Producer: Wes Martin
