I had the pleasure of hearing Michelle Alexander talk about her book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” again last night at Roosevelt University. I had already heard her speak a couple of times before. She is always impressive. Frankly, however, I am not her target audience. I was glad to see that the room was packed with hundreds of people and that many of them seemed to have been shocked and appalled by the information that she was sharing about mass incarceration in 21st century America. One can only hope that even ten percent of those in the room will commit to joining the movement to dismantle mass incarceration.

As I watched Michelle speak, my mind wandered to thinking about some of the fabulous, fierce, and fearless women of color that I admire in history and in the present. One such woman is Lucy Parsons who was an anarchist, feminist, union organizer, and anti-prison activist in the late 19th century through the early 1940s. I have been fascinated by Parsons ever since I received as a gift, a book of her speeches and writings.

Parsons is not well-known today and when people do write about her it is usually as the wife and defender of Haymarket martyr Albert Parsons. Recently, her contributions are coming into fuller view and she is being recognized as the true revolutionary that she was. Robin D. G. Kelley has written that she was “the most prominent black woman radical of the late 19th century.” Yet very little is known about Parsons’s origins because during her lifetime she resisted talking about her biography usually suggesting that the “cause” is always greater than the “individual.” So we are left then with only one book about her life written thirty years ago; a book which has been criticized as overly “simplistic” and “relying too much on hearsay.”

During her lifetime, Parsons was regularly harassed and jailed by authorities. She once remarked that “Every jail on the Pacific coast knows me.” The Chicago Police famously dubbed her “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” When she died, law enforcement officials burned many of her personal writings and artifacts. Thankfully some of her words and thoughts have been recovered and anthologized. For that we should all be grateful.

In an article that she published in the Liberator in 1906, Parsons made the case for a focus on alternatives to prison. She wrote:

“When society has grown wise enough to supplant the prison with the schoolhouse, the teacher for the hangman and kind treatment for punishment and substituting justice and kindness for brutality, we will hear very little more about ‘crime and criminals’.”

Alexander was basically making the same point in her speech last night that Parsons had made over 100 years earlier. There is an unbroken line of agitation and critique about prisons, though the context has markedly changed over the years. I don’t believe that Parsons could have imagined that the U.S. would have over 2 million people behind bars in the 21st century. Well perhaps I underestimate Parsons’s prescience and I should know better…