Lucy Parsons is undoubtedly one of the most controversial people buried in Forest Park. While some might only know her as one of the Haymarket Martyrs’ widows, Parsons was a powerful and influential figure in her own right. The Chicago Police Department once proclaimed she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”
It is nearly impossible to craft a tidy, one-sentence description of Lucy Parsons. Over the course of her life she was an anarchist, a socialist, a syndicalist, and a communist. She was an organizer, writer, speaker and agitator. She referred to herself as being of Mexican and Native American heritage, yet there is strong evidence indicating she was born into slavery to an African-American mother. The year of her birth is listed as 1848, 1851, 1853, and 1859, and it’s not certain if she was born in Texas or Virginia. She used different names over the course of her life. Among the many last names she used were: Carter, Diaz, Del Gather, Gonzalez, Hull, Hall, Waller, and, of course, Parsons.
What is safe to say is that Lucy Parsons unrepentantly dedicated her life to eliminating class struggle and improving the lives of workers, whom she believed were being turned into “wage slaves” by capitalists…