[Comic] Lucy Parsons

Lucia Carter was born in Texas in 1853, to a Creek Indian father and a Mexican mother of African-American descent. She illegally married Albert Parsons, a socialist activist, in 1871. Texas law had prohibited interracial marriage since 1837. The bride and groom fled Waco, and she called herself Lucy Parsons when they arrived in Chicago in 1873.

In Chicago, Lucy Parsons wrote for The Socialist and The Alarm, the magazines of the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) founded by the couple in 1884.

5,000 people were members of the IWPA, when Albert Parsons was hanged on November 11, 1887 along with the other Haymarket martyrs. Repression fell on workers’ political movements and trade unions.

After the execution, Lucy continued her lectures, sometimes accompanied by her two children. She was arrested several times for making speeches in support of the martyrs or distributing anarchist literature.

In 1905, she helped found the revolutionary union Industrial Workers of the World.

Lucy was arrested in January 1915 for organizing hunger protests in Chicago.

Struggling against the social alienation of women, she nevertheless defended marriage and the family. For her, sexist oppression within the couple is a consequence of capitalist economic exploitation.

According to Lucy Parsons, the anarchist ideas on free love, put forward in the 1890s, notably defended by Emma Goldman, were middle-class reflections. The priority must be the class struggle that conditions all social life.

In Chicago’s Bughouse Square, well into her 80s, Lucy continued to go on delivering speeches. She died on March 7, in 1942, during the house fire destroying her home. She is buried near Albert Parsons.