Parsons, Albert

PARSONS, ALBERT (1848–1887). Born in Alabama and orphaned as a youth, Albert Richards Parsons went from fighting in the Confederate army to dying on the scaffold as America’s leading native-born revolutionary labor leader. He apprenticed as a printer to his brother, who was working in Texas, and followed him into service as a Rebel soldier during the Civil War.

After the war, Parsons was radicalized by racial and class conflict, by vigilante violence and state terror, and by falling love. A Republican in Reconstruction Texas, Parsons edited the Waco Spectator and fought for black civil rights. He later described the radical movement as a “labor party” for Blacks in the state. Parsons, who took a bullet in the leg from white racists for his radical activism, married Lucia Carter, an ex-slave of African American and mixed race ancestry, in 1872. Wed during a brief window in which interracial marriages were legal Albert and Lucy Parsons moved to Chicago a year later.

In Chicago, Parsons worked as a printer before being blacklisted for his leading role in the 1877 mass strike in the city—a strike whose bloody suppression profoundly influenced him. He was a leading member of the Knights of Labor, Typographical Union No. 16, the Council Trades and Labor Unions, and the Socialist Labor Party in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and he lobbied for the National Eight-Hour Association in Washington, D.C. When Parsons joined the International Working People’s Association (IWPA) in 1883, he had already drawn conclusions as to the difficulties associated with electoral politics and the dangers of state-sponsored and employer-initiated violence against the labor movement. In the IWPA he more systematically preached anarchism and self-defense but he never lost his emphasis on trade unionism as the basis for a new society.

Albert Parsons imperfectly suited the falsification of facts and context created by the Chicago police and prosecutors after the bomb explosion at Haymarket. He was not a German immigrant but a home-grown radical, in some respects a practical trade unionist. But radical he was, and the demonization of Albert Parsons during the trial and approaching his execution proved to be one of the narratives that live in the history of Chicago and the history of the American Left. Lucy Parsons devoted much of her long life to her late husband’s exoneration.

Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Jones, Jacqueline. Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

Parsons, Albert R. The Life of Albert R. Parsons. Chicago: Lucy E. Parsons, 1889.

Roediger, David, and Franklin Rosemont, eds. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986.

Albert Richards Parsons Papers 1876-1893. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives. Madison, Wisconsin. https://search.library.wisc.edu/catalog/9911125407402121