I received an e-mail a couple of weeks ago from a young woman who I will call Carrie. Carrie introduced herself to me as a 17 year old high school student who is about to start her senior year. She lives in Baltimore and told me that she found the blog this Spring while doing research about mass incarceration for a class project. Apparently, she has been a regular reader ever since. I am grateful for that.

She was writing to ask me for a list of Revolutionary African American women besides Assata Shakur and Angela Davis. She wanted to do some reading about their lives. Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mae Mallory came right to mind for me of course. But I also thought of Lucy Parsons who is still mostly unknown. I’ve written briefly about her on the blog here.

In a couple of weeks, a new biography about Lucy Parson’s life will be published and I can’t wait to read it.

One of the things that I admired about Parsons was her absolute fearlessness. In the late 19th century, she was not afraid to marry a white man and to advocate armed self-defense by the oppressed. As it relates specifically to black people, she wrote in 1886:

“And to the Negro himself we would say your deliverance lies mainly in your own hands. You are the modern Helot. You sow but another reaps. You till the soil but for another to enjoy. Who is this other one who continues to enjoy the fruit of your industry? Are they not the idle few who you but lately acknowledged as your masters, and are not these loafers practically your masters yet in so far as absorbing all your labor product without even being compelled to return you sufficient to keep you in decent food and clothes? For they are not even actuated by the monied interest which they had in you in former years. The overseer’s whip is now fully supplanted by the lash of hunger! And the auction block by the chain-gang and convict cell!

[…]

As to those local, periodical, damnable massacres to which you are at all times liable, these you must revenge in your own way. Are you deaf, dumb and blind to the atrocities that you are subjected to? Have the gaping wounds of your dying comrades become so common that they no longer move you? Is your heart a heart of stone, or its palpitations those of cowards, that you slink to your wretched abode and offer no resistance? Do you need something to nerve you to action? Then look in the tear-stained eye of your sorrowing wife and hungry children, or think of your son, who has been sent to the chain-gang or perhaps murdered upon your door-steps. Do you need more horrible realities than these to goad you on to deeds of revenge that will at least make your oppressors dread you? And this is the beginning of respect! Do you ask me what I would do if I were like you, poor, unarmed and defenseless? 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.”

In the mid-2000s over 60 years after her death, the Chicago Park’s Department decided to dedicate a park to Lucy Parsons on the Northwest side of town. The local police union protested. Lucy Parsons would not have been surprised by this after all the Chicago Police had famously dubbed her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” When she died, law enforcement officials burned many of her personal writings and artifacts. I have no doubt that Parsons would have smiled that even these many years after her death, the Chicago Police were still trying to actively suppress her legacy.