Albert Parsons

Albert Parsons, ca.1880

Albert Richard Parsons (born June 24, 1848 in Montgomery , Alabama ; † November 11, 1887 in Chicago , Illinois , USA , hanged ) was the editor of the anarchist weekly " Alarm " and a spokesman for the American labor movement in Chicago.

parents

Albert Parsons was born on June 24, 1848, to one of ten children in Montgomery, Alabama. His father, Samuel Parsons, was a leather and shoe manufacturer originally from Maine . He was educated and was involved, among other things, in the anti-alcoholic movement. Albert's mother was very religious.

Texas

When Albert was not yet two years old, his mother died and a few years later his father too. So he moved to his eldest brother in Texas , where he lived on his farm. In 1859 Albert moved to his sister in Waco , where he could attend school. A little later he began an apprenticeship at the "Daily News" in Galveston , where he worked as a typesetter and on the side as a newspaper delivery man. In 1861 he joined, although only thirteen, a volunteer association of the southern states in the beginning civil war . Later he continued his activity as a typesetter. In 1868 Parsons began to publish the weekly newspaper "The Spectator" in Waco, in which he promoted the acceptance of the surrender of the southern states and the rights of the former slaves. This brought him a lot of hostility, which is why he gave up the newspaper and in 1869 moved to the "Daily Telegraph" in Houston . For the "Daily Telegraph" Parsons toured northwest Texas, where he met his future wife Lucy Eldine Parsons , whom he married in Austin in the fall of 1872 . From 1870 to 1873, Parsons worked for the US tax authorities.

Labor leader in Chicago

Through his republican activities and his marriage to a Spanish Indian woman who also had black roots, Parsons came under increasing pressure, which probably led him to leave Texas and move north to Chicago. There he resumed his former activity as a typesetter and began to be interested in the labor question. In 1875 he joined the Social Democratic Party of America, later the Socialist Workers' Party of America .

In the course of the great railroad strike of 1877, Parsons lost his job due to his activity as a labor agitator and was blacklisted, which made it impossible for him to find a new job. Parsons began to get involved more and more for the Socialist Workers' Party and ran for the city council of Chicago, among others. As a result of the election fraud, which deprived the socialists of a large part of their votes, Parsons began to doubt parliamentarism and in 1880 withdrew from his political offices. Instead, he got more involved in union work. In the course of this he was involved in founding the International Working People's Association in 1881. In Chicago, the International founded the weekly "Alarm", whose publisher was Parsons.

Condemnation

After a bomb was dropped on the Haymarket on May 4, 1886, when the police were about to break up a workers' meeting, Parsons was arrested along with seven other, mostly German anarchists, and sentenced to death as one of five . On November 11, 1887, he was hanged in Cook County Jail .

Commemoration

On June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned three other Haymarket convicts who were still alive and found them innocent. In 2004 the mayor, trade unions and police agreed on a monument in the form of a bronze statue depicting a speaker on a car. The memorial is meant to symbolize both the Haymarket strike and free speech.

literature

• The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs. first published in the newspaper Knights of Labor , 1886/87 (Reprint. Edited and with an introduction by Philip S. Foner. Humanities Press, New York NY 1969 (= AIMS - American Institute for Marxist Studies. Historical Series 5, ZDB -ID 444865-0 )).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chicago Historical Society: Reasons for pardoning Fielden, Neebe and Schwab ( Memento of the original from November 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Stephen Kinzer: In Chicago, an Ambiguous Memorial to the Haymarket Attack . In: The New York Times , September 15, 2004. Retrieved September 10, 2010.