Reclaiming Lucy Parsons

 ~~ prepared by collectivist action ~~

    LUCY PARSONS ON OPPRESSION

(It has been said by many people that Lucy Parsons was either oblivious to or ignored the struggles of African Americans and women . Although she denied being African American we do know several critically important things about her life:

• She was born an enslaved person on a plantation in antebellum Virginia.

• She and other enslaved people were forced-marched to Texas by the slave master,  fleeing encroaching Union forces.  

• Even though she self-identified as Mexican or Indian (Indigenous American), she was identified by others as ‘mixed’ or Black and, more often than not,  in the most derogatory terms) Michael Tee

• 
  

“. . The more Lucy Parsons involved herself in the revolutionary movement, the more popular she became. She began regularly addressing crowds numbering in the thousands on the streets of Chicago. The press compared her to John Brown and Louise Michel, the “red virgin” of the Paris Commune, who had died fighting to defend the first ever worker-run society in 1871. Lucy Parsons relished the comparison and was prepared to die a martyr, just as the Communards had done.

Her reputation quickly spread beyond Chicago. One reporter from Canton, Ohio, wrote of her, “She is a wonderfully strong writer and it is said she can excel her husband in making a fiery speech.”[28]

She also became virtually the sole revolutionary in the IWPA (or the SLP, for that matter) to seriously take up the “Negro Question” as it was called then. In the spring of 1886, 13 black people were massacred by a white mob in Mississippi as retribution for one of the black men filing assault charges against a local police officer.

In response to this atrocity Parsons wrote:

“Who … could help but stand aghast and heave a sigh and perchance drop a tear as they read the graphic account flashed to us of the awful massacre of the poor and defenseless wage-slaves … in the state of Mississippi? Defenseless, poverty-stricken, hemmed about by their deadly enemies; victims not only of their misfortunes, but to deep-seated, blind, relentless prejudice, these our fellow-beings are murdered without quarter.”

She continues:

“Are there any so stupid as to believe these outrages have been, are being and will be heaped upon the Negro because he is black? Not at all. It is because he is poor. It is because he is dependent. Because he is poorer as a class than his white wage-slave brother of the North.”

And as to what recourse Southern blacks had to fight this tyranny:

“[T]o the Negro himself we would say your deliverance lies mainly in your own hands. You sow but another reaps. You till the soil but for another to enjoy. The overseer’s whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell!

… But your course in the future, if you value real freedom, is to leave politics to the politician, and prayer to those who can show wherein it has done them more good than it has ever done for you, and join hands with those who are striving for economic freedom.

… As to those local, periodical, damnable massacres to which you are at all times liable, these you must revenge in your own way. You are not absolutely defenseless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you”.[29]

Some critics have taken this article as an example of what they call Parsons’ “class reductionism” in approaching the question of racism.[30] Ashbuagh writes that Parsons was “erroneous” in her belief that “all social ills stemmed from economic oppression”; that “the abolition of capitalism would automatically produce racial and sexual equality”; and that “Lucy Parsons did not see that racism and sexism have histories and existences independent of the economic structure of society.[31]

While Lucy Parsons indisputably saw social oppression as a function of the broader economic system in which it operated, it would nonetheless be incorrect to assert that she believed there was no need to wage particular fights against particular forms of oppression, outside of the purely industrial sphere of relations, simply because the abolition of capitalism would “automatically” obviate the need for such fights.

As Ashbaugh well knows, and as we shall see later in Lucy Parson’s political career, she repeatedly, and throughout her life, addressed the specific oppressions faced by women, black people, immigrants, and others, in her articles, speeches, and organizing. She campaigned against lynchings and the racist criminal justice system. She fought for women’s suffrage, equal pay, birth control access, abortion rights, the right to easily divorce and remarry, and to be free from rape.

In 1892, Parsons wrote about a meeting she attended in Chicago organized by local black activists to “protest against the outrages being perpetrated in the South upon peaceful citizens simply because they are Negroes.

“Never since the days of the Spartan Helots has history recorded such brutality as has been ever since the war and is now being perpetrated upon the Negro in the South.

Women are stripped to the skin in the presence of leering, white-skinned, black-hearted brutes and lashed into insensibility and strangled to death from the limbs of trees. A girl child of fifteen years was lynched recently by these brutal bullies. Where has justice fled?

The whites of the South are not only sowing the wind which they will reap in the whirlwind, but the flame which they will reap in the conflagration”.[32]

Further, to truly understand the significance of Lucy Parsons’ forthright condemnation of the scourge of racism, one has to look at the context in which she was operating.

Lucy Parsons was in an extreme minority amongst even most black leaders in the 1890s, who far from advocating armed self-defense, were rather supporting the efforts of Booker T. Washington, whose accommodationist approach to white racism was at the height of its popularity.

And within the ranks of the labor and revolutionary movements, the prevailing notions on racism ranged from the indifferent to the downright odious. For instance, Dyer Lum, the personal secretary to Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), was an extreme racist whose bigotry was nonchalantly accepted by all those around him. Lum, whose path Parsons routinely crossed in the course of various labor organizing efforts, once commented on the news of a Southern black man who had been burned at the stake, “I would have carried wood myself if I had been there. [T]o shoot him would only have made a county sensation. Burning him made the flesh of every nigger brute in the South to creep.”[33]

A similar accusation of “class reductionism” is often leveled against Parsons for her position on women’s oppression, which she argued was a function of woman’s economic dependence on man, first as his “household drudge” and second as a lesser-paid worker.

Parsons’ theoretical approach to the oppression of women was greatly influenced by the writings of August Bebel, the German socialist and close friend of Frederick Engels.[34] Bebel’s book, Women and Socialism, written in 1879, was one of the first instances of a socialist or anarchist attempting a serious, class analysis of the origins and basis of women’s oppression.

In a 1905 article, which drew heavily on Bebel’s ideas, Parsons expounded upon her view on this question:

“[A]s man ascended in the social scale of development, he began to acquire property, which he wished to transmit along with his name to his offspring — then woman became his household drudge.

She was regarded as a sort of necessary evil; as something to be used and abused; to be bought and sold — as a thing fit only to cater to his pleasures and his passions — this was woman’s lowly position. For countless centuries, the drudge went her lonesome, weary way, bore the children — and man’s abuse.”

However, she goes on to explain that the development of industry and the entrance of women into the ranks of the proletariat “was to bring relief at last. This enabled woman to leave the narrow confines of the kitchen where she had been kept for so long. She entered the arena of life’s activities, to make her way in this hustling, pushing, busy world as an independent human being for the first time in the world’s history.”

She ends by cautioning: “But woman is allowing herself to be used to reduce the standard of life by working for lower wages than those demanded by men; this she will have to rectify, else her labor will become a detriment instead of a blessing or help either to herself or her fellow workers.”[35]

Elsewhere she sounded a similar theme, saying,

“We, the women of this country, have no ballot even if we wished to use it … but we have our labor. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Wherever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class use women to reduce them, and if there is anything that you men should do in the future it is to organize the women”.[36]

Finally, on the immense capacity of women to play a key role in the process of social change, she wrote, “When the women take hold of a great and crying evil, you may expect revolution — not necessarily a revolution of blood and destruction, yet not necessarily one of peace.”[37]

Excerpt from:

Lucy Parsons: More Dangerous Than a Thousand Rioters

By Keith Rosenthal

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/keith-rosenthal-lucy-parsons-more-dangerous-than-a-thousand-rioters