The Associated Press
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.”