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PARSONS, ALBERT RICHARD
(1848-1887). Albert Richard Parsons, radical labor organizer,
was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on June 24, 1848, the youngest
child of Samuel and Elizabeth (Tompkins) Parsons. Both parents
died before he was five, and Albert was sent to Tyler, Texas,
to live with his brother William Henry Parsons.qv From 1855 until 1859 the family ranched in Johnson County, Texas,
and from there they moved to Waco. In 1860 Albert Parsons was
apprenticed to Willard Richardsonqv on the Galveston Daily News. When the Civil Warqv began, Parsons joined the Lone Star Grays, a Confederate volunteer
company. Later he served as powder monkey for an artillery unit
at Sabine Pass. In the final years of the war he was a scout for
Parsons's Brigade.qv Following the war Parsons returned to Waco, where he received
his only formal education, studying political economy and moral
philosophy for six months at Waco University (now Baylor University).
In 1867 he began to publish the Spectator, in which he
advocated civil rights for blacks and acceptance of the terms
of surrender. He became a Radical Republican and traveled throughout
Central Texas registering freed slaves to vote. The Republicans
appointed him to a position in the district clerk's office in
Waco in 1870; he was also appointed assistant assessor of United
States revenue and was elected a secretary of the Texas Senate
in 1871. When Reconstructionqv came to an end in Texas, Parsons was hated as a miscegenationist,
a scalawag, a traitor, and a revenue man. He had been shot in
the leg, thrown downstairs, beaten, and threatened with lynching
for his efforts to register black voters. That year, he moved
to Chicago with his wife Lucy E. Parsons,qv a woman of mixed racial heritage, whom he had married in Austin
in 1872. They had two children.
In March 1876 Parsons became a member of the Social
Democratic party of North America, and on July 4, 1876, he joined
the Knights of Labor.qv He became a leading agitator for social change in Chicago, and
the railroad strikes of July 1877 brought him into the limelight.
He was taken to City Hall to face members of the powerful Citizens'
Association, and he was fired from his job as a typesetter at
the Chicago Times and blacklisted. The police chief warned
him that his life was in danger and advised him to leave Chicago
at once. After a series of defeats as a candidate for public office
between 1877 and 1882, Parsons rejected electoral politics and
joined radical trade unionists who advocated industrial struggle
and believed unions to be the embryo of a postrevolutionary society.
Parsons began to call himself an anarchist, although he used the
terms anarchist and socialist interchangeably. Though
his rhetoric was visionary and even violent at times, he remained
committed to improved living conditions for all. To that end he
helped to organize the Chicago Trades and Labor Council and threw
himself into agitation for the eight-hour working day. In October
1884 he became editor of the Alarm, published by the International
Working People's Association.
May 1, 1886, the date set for the inauguration of
the eight-hour day, passed smoothly and with great optimism; Lucy
and Albert Parsons led a march of 80,000 strikers and supporters
up Michigan Avenue. However, violence erupted two days later at
the McCormick Reaper plant, and the anarchists called a meeting
for the night of May 4 in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality.
Parsons spoke, then left the meeting with Lucy and the two children;
they were nearby in Zepf's Hall when nearly 200 policemen marched
into the square; an unknown person threw a bomb, and police began
shooting wildly. Most of the seven police officers and seven members
of the crowd who died apparently sustained wounds from police
revolvers. Albert Parsons left the city that night; in the aftermath
of the bloodshed known radicals were jailed. Parsons returned
to Chicago voluntarily and presented himself to the court, declaring
his innocence and expecting to be exonerated. Ten men were indicted
for conspiracy to murder, among them Parsons. Although the bomb-thrower
was unknown, the prosecutors held that the defendants were guilty
of conspiracy on the grounds that their speeches and writings
might have inspired someone to throw the bomb. Of the eight men
who stood trial, all were convicted, and seven, including Parsons,
were sentenced to death. The defendants appealed to the Illinois
Supreme Court, which upheld the verdict of the lower court. On
November 2, 1887, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear
the case. Parsons refused to appeal to the governor for clemency,
declaring himself innocent and demanding his freedom. Governor
Richard J. Oglesby commuted the sentences of two defendants to
life imprisonment after they appealed for mercy, and the consensus
of historians is that the governor would have spared Parsons's
life had he appealed. On November 11, 1887, Parsons was hanged
with the three comrades whom he refused to desert. Six years later,
Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three defendants who
remained in prison and condemned the convictions as a miscarriage
of justice.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alan Calmer, Labor Agitator: The
Story of Albert R. Parsons (New York: International, 1937).
Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1936; 3d ed., New York: Collier, 1963). Phillip
Foner, ed., The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs
(New York: Humanities Press, 1969). Dyer Daniel Lum, A Concise
History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists in 1886
(Chicago: Socialist, 1887; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1969).
Carolyn Ashbaugh
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