By Ruth Kinna and Clifford Harper. 

Read by Barbara Graham and Jim Donaghey.   

Born to an enslaved woman in 1851, Parsons explored class conflict through the prism of the American Civil War. A keen advocate of independent labour organising in the late nineteenth century, Parsons was active in the Knights of Labor and the anarchist International Working People’s Association. In 1905 she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). She wrote regularly for the anarchist-socialist press and lectured across America, refusing to be cowed by police bans or arrests for riot that followed as a consequence of her defiance. Parsons spearheaded the defence campaigns for the accused of the Haymarket Square bombing, and frequently referred to the injustice of the trial to spotlight the steeliness of capitalist ‘slavocracy’.

Also available at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7I5Bot2GyU

The Great Anarchists pamphlet series is published by Dog Section Press and Active Distribution. See: http://dogsection.org/parsons and http://www.activedistributionshop.org/ for more details.

Music by Them’uns - https://soundcloud.com/user-178917365