Lucy Parsons: "More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters"
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sometimes all at once) as an anarchist, socialist, communist, and
syndicalist. "
http://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2011/09/lucy-parsons-more-dangerous-than.html
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Lucy Parsons: "More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters"
By Keith Rosenthal
===
The strongest argument that can be made as to why all radical
activists should study the life and works of Lucy Parsons is that the
FBI wants you to know nothing about her.
Lucy Parsons died in 1942, at the age of 89, in a house-fire in
Chicago — the city in which she lived most of her life. The ashes had
hardly cooled before the Chicago police raided the remains of her
home, confiscated all 3,000 volumes of literature and writings on
“sex, socialism, and anarchy,” which constituted her personal library,
and turned it over to the FBI. Tragically, and despite her comrades’
repeated inquiries, this treasure trove of revolutionary material was
never again to see the light of day.[1]
Indeed, the Chicago police had ample reason to want to bury Parsons’
legacy as quickly as possible. In their own words, she was “more
dangerous than a thousand rioters.” For virtually the entirety of the
last 40 years of her life, the Chicago police tried to bar her from
making any public speeches, and routinely arrested her for the ‘crime’
of handing out revolutionary pamphlets on the street. Famed labor
historian Studs Terkel even noted how rare of a privilege it was to
hear Parsons address a large audience in her later years, owing to the
constant police harassment.
Overlooked by History
Partially because so much of her own writings were ‘disappeared’ by
the government, and partially because she was a revolutionary woman of
color speaking out against the injustices of a capitalist society run
by white men, Lucy Parsons is one of the least known of the major
figures in the history of revolutionary socialism in the U.S. Much
like her long-time comrades and friends, Eugene Debs, William “Big
Bill” Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Lucy Parsons made a
tremendous contribution to the birth of America’s turn-of-the-century,
revolutionary working-class movement; a movement which continues to
this day to shape the character of class struggle and revolutionary
politics in this country.
Historian Robin Kelley argues that Lucy Parsons was not only “the most
prominent black woman radical of the late nineteenth century,” but was
also “one of the brightest lights in the history of revolutionary
socialism.”[2] Historian John McClendon writes that she is notable for
being the “first black activist to associate with the revolutionary
left in America.”[3]
More often than not, however, if Lucy Parsons is mentioned as an
historical figure, she is noted merely as the “wife of Albert
Parsons,” a man who had gained international notoriety after he was
executed in 1887 by the state of Illinois for his revolutionary
activities.
Unfortunately, this slight extends beyond solely ‘mainstream’
historians, including supposedly left-wing intellectuals as well. For
instance, in the 1960s, the feminist editors of Radcliffe College’s
three-volume work, Notable American Women, decided to leave Parsons
out of their study on the grounds that she was “largely propelled by
her husband’s fate” and was a “pathetic figure, living in the past and
crying injustice” after her husband’s execution.[4]
Even contemporaries of Lucy Parsons, such as the popular
anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman (with whom Lucy Parsons became a
life-long political opponent), accused Parsons of being an otherwise
unimportant opportunist who simply rode upon the cape of her husband’s
martyrdom, describing her as nothing more than one of those wives of
“anarchists who marry women who are millions of miles removed from
their ideas.”[5]
None of this, however, is to diminish the historical importance of
Albert Parsons and the events leading up to his execution; and while
it is true that Lucy Parsons spent much of her life addressing the
crime that was her husband’s murder at the hands of the capitalist
state, nonetheless, her political activity and impact on history
extend far beyond the scope of that single tragedy. In fact, the work
that she lent her energies to in the years following Albert’s
execution are of equal (if not greater) importance than anything he
had been able to add to the fight for workers’ emancipation in the
course of a life that was sadly cut short.
“Whose Lucy Parsons?”
In one sense, Lucy Parsons defies easy political categorization.
Throughout her life she referred to herself alternatively (and
sometimes all at once) as an anarchist, socialist, communist, and
syndicalist. She worked with socialist groups in the 1870s and
anarchist groups in the 1880s. She was part of the founding of the
Socialist Party in the 1890s and the revolutionary-syndicalist
Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s. Finally, the last
two decades of her life would see her working with the Communist
Party.
The fact that she allowed her ideas on revolution and revolutionary
organization to adapt so much over the years have led some present-day
activists to feel the need to “rescue” her in order to firmly place
her under the banner of their particular ideology to the exclusion of
all others. For instance, the anarchist author Gale Ahrens, in the
Introduction to her otherwise useful collection of Lucy Parsons’
writings and speeches, waxes near apoplectic at the thought that
anyone would consider Lucy Parsons a communist. The origin of her ire
is the only existing biography of Lucy Parsons, written by Carolyn
Ashbuagh, in which Ashbaugh concludes that Lucy Parsons officially
joined the Communist Party in 1939.
Despite the fact that this conclusion is backed up by several
interviews conducted by Ashbaugh with contemporaries of Lucy Parsons
(both friend and foe), and Lucy Parsons’ own words, which reveal the
fact that by the 1930s she was publicly referring to herself as
“connected with” the Communist Party, Ahrens feels the need to take
pains to attack what, in her words, is an “unlikely image of Lucy
Parsons as Communist — or worse, as The Anarchist Who Became a
Communist.”[6]
Clearly for Ahrens there is nothing worse than an anarchist becoming a
communist. However, the actual writings and actions of Lucy Parsons
herself reveal that this aversion to communism is wholly that of
Ahrens, and is not something that Parsons shared in the least.
As one anarchist writer has correctly pointed out regarding those,
like Ahrens, who would attempt to declare that Lucy Parsons was one
thing by simply lopping off those pieces of her life that indicate she
was also something else, “Gale Ahrens’ documentary history was an
attempt to rescue Parsons ‘for the anarchist movement.’ In doing so
Ahrens provides anarchism with another hero but does little to
demystify Parsons’ legacy. Indeed, the real question is not whose hero
Lucy Parsons is, but how we can learn from her struggle and how her
history can provide a better understanding of American radicalism.”[7]
Perhaps the most egregious example of this type of pick-and-choose
approach to Lucy Parsons’ legacy is the Lucy Parsons Project website,
which posits itself as a “tribute to Lucy Parsons, her work, and the
causes she championed.”[8] This would all be well and good if the
website actually lived up to its promise. While useful insofar as it
provides some of Parsons’ own writings and speeches, it unfortunately
does her a major disservice by creating a distorted, incomplete
picture of what constituted her political life.
While one can find on this website a myriad of writings on anarchism
(including those by and about Emma Goldman, who Parsons grew to
utterly despise by the end of her life), as well as links to several
dozen contemporary anarchist websites, one will not find any writings
by or about Karl Marx, anything about the successes of the Russian
revolution of 1917, nor links to any contemporary socialist websites
(not to mention any specifically anti-racist media), though these were
all major, if not defining, contributors to Lucy Parsons’ political
worldview.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not note the other side of this
trend, which can be seen in erroneous attempts to declare that at no
point in Parsons’ life did she ever actually espouse anarchist ideas,
which Ashbaugh appears wont to do in her biography. This, of course,
is plainly not true.
In the end, while people like Emma Goldman considered Lucy Parsons an
‘opportunist’ for working with different revolutionary organizations
and letting her politics evolve over the years, I would argue that
this is actually her greatest attribute. Unlike Goldman, Lucy Parsons
retained a firm, unwavering commitment throughout her entire life to
identifying with, and struggling for, the liberation of working people
as a class from the chains of capitalist exploitation, while
simultaneously being open to a number of different forms in which that
liberation might be brought about.
For Lucy Parsons, the aegis under which workers (and by extension,
herself) were best able to fight for their social emancipation was not
important. If a new type of organization or tactic in the class
struggle was developed that seemed an advance over that which preceded
it, Parsons did not miss a beat in throwing herself into the work of
this new-found creation. Lucy Parsons had only one loyalty — to the
downtrodden, oppressed, abused, and exploited. In the end, she
measured an organization or an action, not by what label it could be
categorized under, but how effective it was in moving this latter
group of people into revolutionary action. It is for this reason, and
not ‘opportunism,’ that Lucy Parsons was so quick to latch on to new
organizations and ideas that emerged in the course of what she
considered to be the great and ongoing war between labor and capital.
Lucy Parsons Becomes a Socialist
http://joanofmark.blogspot.com/2011/09/lucy-parsons-more-dangerous-than.html