“Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.”
— Lucy Gonzalez Parsons
Lucy Gonzalez Parsons
Labor Radical, Abolitionist, Co-Founder of the IWW
Born
c. 1853, Texas, likely born into slavery
Identity
Black, Mexican, and Native American woman; radical labor organizer
Known For
Co-founding the IWW; 70+ years of labor organizing; building multiracial coalitions across the U.S. and England
Era
Reconstruction through World War II: nearly 90 years of unbroken organizing
Lucy Gonzales Parsons was born around 1853 in Texas, a woman of African American, Mexican, and Native American descent, likely born into slavery. She spent nearly nine decades refusing to let the world tell her what was possible. By any measure, she was one of the most consequential radical organizers in American history. She was also one of the most deliberately erased.
After marrying Albert Parsons, a white former Confederate soldier turned radical Republican, the couple was driven out of Texas by violent opposition to their interracial relationship. They landed in Chicago, where both became central figures in the labor movement. When Albert was executed in 1887 following the Haymarket Affair, a case that labor historians widely consider a miscarriage of justice. Lucy did not grieve quietly. She picked up the banner and carried it further than Albert ever had.
She traveled the United States and England as a speaker and writer, building the kind of multiracial, multi-issue coalitions that were decades ahead of their time. She co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, known as the Wobblies), organized the Working Women's Union, led marches of unemployed and unhoused workers through Chicago's wealthiest streets, and never stopped. She fought for the freedom of the Scottsboro Boys. She organized support for Angelo Herndon. At 89 years old, she was still attending meetings.
On March 7, 1942, Lucy Parsons died in a house fire. The FBI arrived before the ashes had cooled. They seized her personal library of over 1,500 books.
Who She Was
Born into slavery. Died still organizing.
Intersectionality is not a new idea. Lucy Parsons was living it in 1877.
The Freedom Center's work lives at the intersection of race, gender, faith, and economic justice. Lucy Parsons built her entire life at that intersection, a century before anyone gave it a name. Her story belongs in any honest account of American resistance.
She also reminds us that the people who most threaten those in power are the ones most aggressively erased from history. The FBI didn't seize the library of a harmless old woman. They seized it because, at 89, her ideas were still dangerous to someone.
Lucy Parsons understood, decades before most thinkers put words to it, that race, gender, and class are not separate problems with separate solutions. They are woven together, and any movement that ignores one will fail the others. She was one of the first women of color in American history to carry a socialist message across the country and overseas, not as a token voice, but as a leader shaping strategy and doctrine.
She saw the connections everyone else refused to make..
What made her different
She was not a footnote to the labor movement. She was one of its architects. Her erasure from mainstream history is itself a political act: a decision about whose story gets told as American history.
Think you know American history? Keep walking.
Their existence was an act of resistance.
The story doesn’t end here. Join us for the more of our 250 Years of Resistance events