[Marxism] Haymarket

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note by Hunter Bear:

These are two related posts:  A contemporary story, illustrating once again
the great Power of Haymarket and its martyrs and especially Lucy Parsons --
and the venomous perfidy of much of the Chicago Police Department; and an
earlier post of mine on Haymarket and its always enduring inspiration and
meaning in the Save the World Business.    Hunter [Hunter Bear]

Police union upset by plans to name park for Haymarket figure

March 22, 2004 - The Chicago Federation of Police is trying to dissuade the
Chicago Park District from naming a small Northwest Side park in honor of a
woman described by one 19th century police official as "more dangerous than
a thousand rioters."

In a letter to Park District board members, FOP president Mark P. Donohue
said he was "disappointed and disheartened" by plans to name the park after
Lucy Ella Gonzales Parsons, the widow of a man hanged in 1887 for his
purported role in the Haymarket Square bombing of the previous year.

A parks spokesman said Parsons' name was suggested by Chicago Parks
historian Julia Bachrach in honor of Parsons' long work as a labor organizer
and champion of women and minority group members.

The nomination was part of a larger effort to recognize more women in a
system where only 27 of 555 parks are named after women.

Lucy Ella Gonzales, who was of mixed black, Mexican and American Indian
ancestry, was born in Texas, possibly as a slave. After the Civil War she
married Confederate Army veteran Albert R. Parsons, a printer who became
deeply involved in civil rights activism and the fight for an eight-hour
work day.
To escape racial prejudice in Texas, the couple moved to Chicago, where they
both took up the anarchist cause.

On May 1, 1886, the two led the "Bread and Roses" parade, one of the city's
first mass labor demonstrations in favor of the eight-hour day. Some 80,000
people took part in the march along Michigan Avenue. Three nights later,
however, someone threw a dynamite bomb at a labor rally in Haymarket Square,
killing several people, including Police Officer Mathias Degnan.

Although Albert Parsons had left the rally be the time the bomb was thrown,
he was one of the eight anarchists arrested and tried for their purported
involvement in the bombing. Incendiary labor pamphlets written by Lucy
Parsons were read into the record at the trial.

The eight were found guilty, and Albert Parsons and four others were
sentenced to be hanged.

Albert Parsons and three others were executed on Nov. 11, 1887. The fourth
condemned man, Louis Lingg, used an explosive device to kill himself in his
cell the night before the hangings. The three other defendants were pardoned
in 1894 by Gov. John Peter Altgeld, who found that their trial had been a
miscarriage of justice.

After her husband's death, Lucy Parsons continued to be a labor and social
activist, although she was often barred from public speaking by the police,
whom she characterized as "organized bandits" and "minions of the oppressing
class."

She died in 1942.

"She wasn't named because she was Albert Parsons' wife," said parks
spokesman Julian Green. "Lucy Parsons promoted women's labor and civil
rights in Chicago. She was highly regarded by Jane Addams and other social
reformers."

Public comment on the proposed park naming can be offered on April 14, Green
said.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

THE MEANING OF HAYMARKET  [3/27/01]  Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear]

I very much like and appreciate Mitch Jones' reflective, well-organized, and
lucid essay -- and its focus on Haymarket. [I also think John Lacny's quite
thoughtful comments indicate excellent scholar/activism. Careful, John, you
might become a professor!] These are just a couple of thoughts on Haymarket
and its influence: The primary force, of course, behind the formation of the
Industrial Workers of the World was the Western Federation of Miners -- but
there were many rivers that went into the Wobblies. Mitch is quite right in
contending that Haymarket was a very influential factor. Privileged indeed
to know many of the old-time Wobblies in the Far West in the 1950s -- and to
maintain a close friendship with several of them well beyond that -- I can
certainly personally attest to the fact that the Haymarket situation and its
continuing martyrdom influenced many IWW activists. In a few of these cases
of which I'm personally aware, such as C.E. "Stumpy" Payne -- a founder of
the IWW in 1905 and one of its leading organizers, editors, and writers who
was almost 90 when I was barely 21-- Haymarket, as it unfolded, was one of a
number of key, formative, and contemporary forces. From one of the younger
old-timers, Fred Thompson, whose Canadian socialism developed in the 1910s
and who became an active Wobbly in the 'States in the early 'twenties -- a
noted organizer and writer, and a great editor -- Haymarket was always a
major dimension and its martyrdom a continuing inspiration always. As a
teenager in his first metal mining job in an isolated Nevada setting,
William D. Haywood read in the newspapers the developing and unfolding
Haymarket situation, discussed it constantly with his fellow-workers (some
of whom had been members of the Knights), and specifically notes its
influence on him in his excellent Bill Haywood's Book: The Autobiography of
William D. Haywood [1929 and many more recent editions.] In exile in the
Soviet Union and, near death in 1928, Haywood asked that his ashes be buried
at Waldheim cemetery, Chicago, near the graves of the Haymarket martyrs.
[Half of them are indeed at Waldheim and the other half are in the Kremlin
Wall.] In Chicago for a Workers Education Local 189 conference in late April
and early May, 1986 -- the 100th anniversary, of course -- I was extremely
impressed by the large-scale and rich array of Haymarket commemoration
events going on around the city. In addition to accomplishing, at least for
that historical moment, the ecumenical coming-together of virtually every
radical group, the events drew large numbers of minorities, union people,
students. My youngest son, then vaguely interested in journalism,
accompanied me and, at one point, we spent a full day with my good old
friend, the great Wobbly editor, Fred Thompson, who not only talked
extensively of Haymarket and its continuing influence -- but also persuaded
my son to major in journalism [and my son did indeed become a reporter --and
now an editor.] Less than a year later, Fred passed into the Spirit World --
there, I'm sure, to organize and write and raise constructive hell. It's
certainly very clear indeed that the Haymarket martyrdom, like Joe Hill, is
an enduring piece of our food and freedom radical culture -- and with
continuing effects well beyond our turf.    Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear]
www.hunterbear.org

HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]
www.hunterbear.org

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]



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