Rebered women: Lucy Parsons

The release of women

She understood the importance of a united working class – of black -white workers, men and women, internationally

Lucy Parsons was an influential Union organizer and journalist in the United States.

Parsons was born in 1851 in Virginia, the daughter of the slave, but moved to Texas in 1863, where she worked as a tailor.

She and her husband, Albert Parsons, fled Texas to Chicago in 1873 after Supremacist White Ku Klux Klan he targeted them. In Chicago Parsons he was strongly involved in politics, especially the main work movements in the US.

Around the birth period of her first child, Parsons began to speak against hunger and terrible poverty that tasted the city.

At this moment, she understood that only social movements could make real changes and that the unions were the vehicle for the Revolution. She condemned violence, especially in response to racist violence and demanded the class struggle against racism.

Along with other women in the socialist movement, Parsons set up the Union of Women Working from Chicago, who encouraged women to be united and fight for an 8 -hour working day. She broke the conventions of the time continuing to be political active while she is pregnant with the second child.

And in the 1880s, Parsons drove the seamstores in Chicago.

In 1886, the Haymarket business turned Parsons’s life up. About 300,000 workers were on strike in Chicago, who were greeted with a number of police brutality.

A protest against this brutality was called. While the police advanced to disperse the protest, a home-made bomb was thrown on their path-the police responded opening fire in the crowd.

The attempts that followed were witch hunting led by the state to collapse on anarchists, unionist socialists and others on the left.

The US work movement at that time was divided on the adventure reaction mode, but the negative reactions did not stop Parsons to speak.

She went to a US speaking tour, addressing about 200,000 people, helping to finance the legal defense of those in the process. In these speeches, it often highlighted the complicity of the media in the repression of the state.

The state went after Albert Parsons, who gave a protest speech, putting it in the process and executing it. And the officers also attacked Lucy Parsons’s office, abused racially and frequently detained and harassed them throughout the trials.

Parsons itself escaped only the accusations, because prosecutors thought it would be too much a scandal to try to execute a woman.

But the repression of the state did not stop Parsons’s activism. He traveled to Europe and debated with figures like Annie Besant, a leader of the girls’ strike strike.

When he returned to the US, he was part of the debates about monogamy and maternity, he was active in anti-war movements and was an important writer in anarchist works. This is despite the long decade campaign from the police to stop talking.

And Parsons is one of the co-founder The world’s international workers (IWW). She was part of a group of work activists who met in 1905 to create “one great union”.

In her opening speech to the group, Parsons declared the key request of the group as “revolutionary socialism”. She argued in her speech that this means “that the land will belong to the without land, toilet tools and producers.”

Parsons has widespread topics such as anarchism, the need for black workers to be involved in the class struggle and the role of women.

In the 1920s, Chicago police described Parsons as “more dangerous than a thousand revolts.” During this period of his life, he began to move away from anarchism and communist politics.

He worked in the 1920s with the National Committee on Defense of International Work, an organization led by the communist, who defended both the work activists and the black people who were victimized.

Parsons continued to play an essential role in the US work and socialist movements until her death in 1941.

She understood the importance of a united working class – of white -black workers, men and women, internationally.

Parsons argued that if every worker “should decide in their minds that he would have what to do and that no spear will live on their effect, then there is no army big enough to overcome you, for you, you are the army.”