From former slave to anarchist: Lucy Parsons’ radical life and legacy

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

William C. Anderson:

Yeah. Lucy Parsons is an extremely inspiring figure for me personally. She was a radical anarchist who made waves as a labor organizer and she was also an outspoken militant. She was very much ahead of her time for a person during the era in which she lived. And this is a formerly enslaved Black woman who was speaking with an unfettered, unrestrained radicalism. And she didn’t live with a lot of openness around her race and her personal history, but she had a very interesting life. She married one of the victims of the infamous haymarket affair where there were seven anarchists who were essentially framed for a bombing in Chicago. And this was fairly common at the time to frame and persecute anarchists. And there were a lot of fears during that era around insurrectionary anarchism as well as immigrants with anarchist leanings. So I don’t know how central I would say Lucy’s life is to understanding Black anarchism in a more current form because this was a very different time period in which she lived.

But she does help us to think through a lot of the questions around statelessness when you look at the perspectives that her life offers us. Her relationship to race, again, it’s complicated. But as a former slave, she talked about building socialism outside of the state, and that’s what anarchism is in its classical forms. And she was even a person who argued against voting when she didn’t have the right to vote as a Black woman. So I think that she was also, again, trying to meet this challenge of building a radicalism and pushing a radicalism that is able to think outside of the state form and that was able to meet the challenge of mass organizing and collective liberation without it having to rely strictly on centralization in the state and some of the things we know today as norms like representative democracy. She was pushing for a much more direct democratic type of radicalism.

Mansa Musa:

In terms of, and unpack this because it’s important that our audience understand historical conditions, social political, economically, that existed during the time Lucy was organized versus what we see today. Same conditions, maybe more draconian, maybe more repressive in terms of the way this system is going about suppressing civil disobedience and how they institutionalize the police authority to go around and round up people under any pretense. Educate, I always want understanding why, understand that history is important to understand where we at today.

William C. Anderson:

Well, it all set a precedent. When I look at somebody like Lucy Parsons and I look at the era that she’s coming out of, it really explains quite a bit to me about how we got where we are. Because again, as I mentioned, this is happening at a time leading … Looking at Lucy Parsons’ life, if we go back to the late 1800s leading into the turn of the century, this is at a time where anarchism and its development was very explicitly threatening the ruling classes of the world. Anarchism was an international movement that had created a lot of fear amongst the ruling classes because it not only challenged the idea that a ruling class was needed or that you needed representatives or you needed leadership, it also was something that threatened the individual lives of the people who made up those positions, as well as the authorities.

So Lucy Parsons was one of these people who represented a movement that was not only willing to say that we could build a different society, but also threatened the physical wellbeing of the ruling classes and the authorities. Anarchists at that time were engaged in a lot of direct attacks and assassinations, expropriations, and other things that led to eventually different heads of state being killed, being threatened, and so on and so forth, but they eventually decided that they needed to formally come together to create infrastructure and authorities that cross borders to respond to the Archist threat. When that happened, it led to a number of different reforms and the birth of new institutions to take on all types of radicalism. So if we’re thinking a little bit, we move a little bit further ahead, when President McKinley is in office, he’s assassinated by an anarchist, and he then has Teddy Roosevelt come into office after him and respond to the anarchist threat with the creation of what would become the FBI.

Mansa Musa:

Right, right, right.

William C. Anderson:

So all of that history sets that precedent that I’m talking about where the birth of the FBI is actually happening in direct response to the anarchist threat. We oftentimes think about McCarthyism and we think about the Red Scare, but anarchism was a huge central part of what was actually being responded to in terms of the authorities cracking down during that time. It wasn’t just anti-communism, it was also anti-anarchism. And I’m not trying to make communism and anarchism mutually exclusive there because there are people who identify with both. But what I’m saying is it wasn’t a one or another thing. It was all of it, socialist, communist, anarchist, people who identified across those different categories. There was a huge movement of repression at that time that anarchists were very much a crucial part of. And Lucy Parsons was a part of that history and that moment as well.

So

Mansa Musa:

Basically she was a headter