![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0c9edfdc-af1c-49fb-8688-e69c0554cfd6_1400x1867.jpeg)
Hunger was a flame licking a stick of dynamite in Lucy Parsons’ revolutionary imagination.1 Dispossessed and disinherited workers could blow up the coffers of the industrialists and robber barons of Gilded Age Chicago and feast on their excesses and exploits. In a column published in 1884, the Chicago Tribune assured Chicagoans with coin in hand or purse that there was an easy solution to panhandlers: “When a tramp asks you for bread, put arsenic on it and he will not trouble you anymore.”2
1884 Chicago. Two years before a riot in the Haymarket would change her life forever, Parsons wrote a manifesto in the inaugural issue of the anarchist publication The Alarm. She called on “each of you hungry tramps who read these lines” to “avail yourselves of those little methods of warfare which Science has placed in the hands of the poor man.” Taking up arms was, for many anarchists, an increasingly necessary strategy in the face of violent industrial expansion. Lucy Parsons was a fan. “Learn the use of explosives!” she said in the final line of her love letter to the tramps.3
Anarchists brought their revolutionary imaginations to life in late nineteenth century Chicago. Amidst sprawling radical enclaves of immigrant activists and Black insurgents, Parsons honed a practice of freedom based on some pretty clear-cut anarchist tenets: direct action, political education, and mutual aid instead of charity.
Parsons’ activist life was expansive. Many historians, however, have relegated her to “wife of…” status in the larger canon of American radicalism and anarchism. From her early time in the 1870s working as a dressmaker and organizer for the Chicago Working Women’s Union and the Socialist Labor Party, she was a prolific writer, orator, and anti-capitalist agitator. The execution of the Haymarket Martyrs including her husband Albert Parsons, and the unrelenting surveillance that stemmed from the racist, state-sanctioned police violence in Chicago, would haunt her days. As Angela Davis writes, however, Lucy Parsons was “far more than a faithful wife and angry widow who wanted to defend and avenge her husband.”4
The radical subculture of Chicago was crucial to Parsons’ activism. But, her time moving through the south and the Texas borderlands was also formative and traumatic. Parsons’ early life, however, remains difficult to piece together. What a handful of biographers agree on is that Lucia Eldine Gonzalez was born in Virginia in 1851 and was of Mexican, African, and Native American descent. During the Civil War, Lucy Parsons and her mother and brother “endured a brutal wartime ‘middle passage’ from Virginia to Central Texas,” writes biographer Jacqueline Jones. She met her partner in crime and anarchy, Albert Parsons, in Waco in 1870.5
A former confederate soldier, Albert Parsons would become a white rabble-rouser and “race traitor.” As a reporter at the helm of the Waco Spectator, he would attempt to reveal the project of whiteness at work following the Civil War and by targeting the increasingly visible and empowered Ku Klux Klan in Texas. Because of the stringent miscegenation laws of the time--white supremacist laws that sought to keep white and non-white folks from marrying or living together--their marriage was extralegal. The pair’s inter-racial marriage and anti-racist politics riled the local white terrorists and soon the two were hustling their way up north to Chicagoland.
Once in Chicago, Lucy Parsons worked as a dressmaker and, through that labor, organized the Working Women’s Union. She was also a founding member of The Alarm, a widely read anarchist newspaper. In the decade leading up to Haymarket, Parsons was honing her critical lens, writing prolifically, and standing upon many a soapbox, generating rally cries for women workers who were exploited by wealthy industrialists. Hippolyte Havel, one of Emma Goldman’s besties, would later refer to that midwestern ruling class as “the porkocracy of Chicago.”6
Food, food production, and food provisioning were not sideline to the anarchist movement or to the struggles of workers demanding fair wages and eight hour days. Rather, food was a central element that grounded those movements. That grounding came about in various forms. The meatpacking facilities surrounding the area were one way to see it; the McCormick Reapers workers assembled to boost the agricultural productivity that was driving the food system were another. The food wagons that filled the square to feed hungry laborers (and then protestors) were too.
In the spring of 1886 Chicago, between April 25 and May 1, there was a massive strike wave. The Eight Hour Movement reached a fever pitch with workers of all stripes aligning under one cause. The Central Labor Union rallied on the Lake Front on Sunday April 25, a week before May 1st. It was a massive demonstration where an estimated 25,000 folks occupied the Lake Front, toting placards that read “Private Capital Represents Stolen Labor,” “Eight Hours—Working Time, May 1, 1886,” and “Down with Throne, Altar, and Money Bags.”7
Haymarket Square was a farmers market. One of Chicago’s largest open-air markets, it hosted a sprawl of wagons situated along commission houses that traded in fruits and vegetables. As a city food space, it served a few different functions. Farmers would arrive in the early mornings, back their wagons full of fresh produce up to retailers who might buy veggies in bulk, then see those retailers sell to customers at stalls they rented in the Square. Others might set up ad hoc curb markets to forgo renting a stall, creating their own food hub in racially segregated space.
Striking workers used the Haymarket as a commons not only for buying food and peddling wares, but also for stirring up momentum and agitating on the side of labor.8 On May 4, 1886—three years before the People’s Grocery in Memphis opened its doors—Lucy Parsons was 35. She and a cadre of labor syndicalists held a rally in solidarity with striking McCormick Reaper Works workers in the Haymarket.
Police loomed and the protestors were on edge. As the rally ended and people were dispersing, someone—likely a Pinkerton infiltrator in the crowd—threw a bomb into the crowd. Police immediately set their targets on well-known anarchist incendiaries and journalists in the area. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, Louis Lingg, Michael Schwab, Samuel Fielden and Oscar Neebe, all prominent Chicago-based anarchists, were arrested for inciting a riot in the Haymarket.
The collective trauma that immigrant communities experienced following Haymarket was enduring, as was the state violence that the anarchists’ executions sanctioned. This anti-radical, anti-immigrant legal architecture would prove to be part of a much larger and lasting project of white supremacy in the United States.
Writing in Industrial Worker on May 1, 1912, Lucy Parsons described the events leading up to Haymarket. On the afternoon of May 3rd, she recalled, there was a groundswell of striking works in southwest Chicago, many of them McCormick Reaper Works’ employees. In the mainstream papers, there was talk of riots. The police showed up in full force. “On this occasion,” writes Parsons, “they shot seven working men and clubbed many hundreds unmercifully. The next evening the Haymarket meeting was called. The Haymarket meeting is referred to historically as ‘The Haymarket Anarchists’ Riot.’ There was no riot at Haymarket except a police riot.”9
The Haymarket Affair is rightly understood by historians as a signature moment in a longer history of labor strife and radical practice. Yet, it was also structured through the foodways of the 1880s and the work of food provisioning so crucial to urban livelihoods in ways that have often been left unstated. Again, Haymarket was a farmers’ market and protesters used the Haymarket as the stage for their opposition to exploitative industrial agriculture as factory owners laid the foundation of what we know today as Big Ag.
Oppositions to the white nationalist legal architecture—the trial, anti-immigrant language, the state violence—were also projects of citizen-making through food. This was another way Parsons was building attention to food justice in ways we find still resonating today. She saw that the state-making ambitions of radical suppression were efforts to control both labor and access to food.
Haymarket, however, was just the beginning for Lucy Parsons. Through and beyond that traumatic event, she continued to refine her critique of capitalism and its many tentacles with a particular emphasis on mutual aid and revolutionary unionism.
Parsons was critical of the growing industry of philanthropy and charity as a cog in the great “wheel of fortune,” especially in the face of devastating economic downturns and depressions. It was the working class that bore the brunt of the whims of Wall Street. Walking the streets of Chicago regularly, Parsons would report back in the columns of radical newspapers like The Demonstrator. “The free coffee wagons and soup kitchens are in full operation, and all the police stations and cheap lodging-houses are filled to suffocation.” To be clear, these humble, free food efforts were not the problem for Parsons. “Charity is the dope being handed out by the robber class at present to the poor people to keep them quiet, and it is successful at least for the time being.”10 For Parsons, capitalism was the problem and charity, through an ever-expanding philanthropic industrial complex, was not a solution.11
Anarchists like Parsons embraced the idea of solidarity not charity. In her work on anarchist women and diasporic radicalism, historian Jennifer Guglielmo explains that anarchist women’s activism was buoyed through mutual aid networks that would enable them to “provide for their collective needs, build community, and confront their marginalized position within the capitalist world order.”12 Mutual aid is the idea that the philanthropy of the wealthy--charity--masks the exploitation of workers through benevolent capitalism and violent patriarchy. Similar to the cooperative model of ownership that we see at People’s Grocery, mutual aid was a radical approach to collective care and community-based political engagement.
Movement strategies like direct action and labor syndicalism also rounded out Parsons’ visionary politics of hunger. She was a co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905 and took over as editor of the anarchist newspaper Liberator. “One Big Union!” This was the rally cry of the IWW whose affiliates were affectionately known as Wobblies. She wrote, “My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in, and take possession of the necessary property of production.”13
There is so much more to say about Lucy Parsons and her vast, public life of resistance and revolutionary politics: Parsons will always have a seat at our banquet table. I need to wrap things up, but it’s worth noting that on February 23, 1941, Parsons would give her last, large public speech to the Farm Equipment Workers Union of International Harvester--the new corporate face of the former McCormick Reaper Works, coming full circle and calling on workers to defend their labor and right to a full life. At the 1941 May Day Parade, Parsons waved her way through the streets of Chicago atop the Farmer Equipment Workers’ float one last time.
“Think clearly and act quickly,” Parsons once wrote, “or you are lost.”14
May Day is an invitation to mobilize the past–from the river to the sea and in service of our revolutionary present. A call for workers of the world to unite, a most sacred day of solidarity, a rite of revolt as eternal as our struggle, and a love letter to our beloved Lucy. Seize the means, y’all.
Some sections of this essay were originally published in my chapter “Eat the Rich: Radical Food Justice in Memphis and Chicago” in Benjamin R. Cohen, Michael, S. Kideckel, and Anna Zeide, eds., Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2021), 133-148.
““More Dangerous than a Thousand Rioters”: The Revolutionary Life of Lucy Parsons” The Nation, November 15, 2016,
Lucy E. Parsons, “A Word To Tramps,” The Alarm, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 4, 1884, 1
Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1981), 89.
Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (New York: Basic Books, 2017), xiii.
Emma Goldman, Mother Earth, Vol 7, No. 1, March 1912
Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 204
Food scholar Monica White discusses how the history of food spaces as commons reveals a lot about how disinherited communities mobilize justice. “Commons as praxis,” writes White “engages and contests dominant practices of ownership, consumerism, and individualism and replaces them with shared social status and shared identities of race and class. It functions as an organizing strategy that emphasizes community well-being and wellness for the benefit of all.” Quote from Monica White in Freedom Farmers, Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 8-9.
Lucy E. Parsons, “The Eight-Hour Strike of 1886,” Industrial Worker, May 1 1912
Lucy E. Parsons, The Demonstrator on January 16, 1908
See the paradigm shifting work INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham: Duke University Press, Second Edition, 2010).
Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 63.
Lucy E. Parsons, “Speech to the IWW in 1905”
Gale Ahrens, ed. Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity, Writing & Speeches, 1878-1937 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 21, 38.