Anarchy in the Archive: Finding Lucy Parsons

Upon the death of Lucy Parsons—Chicago labor organizer, anarchist, newspaper editor, lecturer, polemicist—authorities destroyed her library and personal papers. Assembled over the span of her radical activism from the... [ view full abstract ]

Upon the death of Lucy Parsons—Chicago labor organizer, anarchist, newspaper editor, lecturer, polemicist—authorities destroyed her library and personal papers. Assembled over the span of her radical activism from the 1870s to 1937, this archive perhaps contained a clue to Parsons's ambiguous racial identity. The press as well as her comrades dubbed her “la mestiza,” “mulatto,” and “Negro,”yet Parsons variously self-described as Mexican and Indian. Without her own papers—what could have been a definitive statement of her racial identity in her own words—how are critics supposed to find the “real” Lucy Parsons?

This paper takes Lucy Parsons's biography as a critical provocation rather than a loss. Held in the nineteenth century to be “more dangerous than a thousand rioters,” Parsons still challenges easy archival logics, racial categorization, and literary canonicity. I recover her as a complicating figure of anti-statism and Afro-Latina indigeneity. The archival gaps surrounding her life represent her disruptive political-aesthetic practice, I argue: in the face of state repression following the Haymarket Affair, and as the Plessy era harshened the color line, Parsons worked and wrote to frustrate oppressive classifications. I draw this paper from a larger project recovering Parsons's writings in order to incorporate them into the African American literary canon. Early African American literature is marked by its “chaos,” according to John Ernest, its challenges to easy notions of authorship or genre or even racial definition. Lucy Parsons embodied a resistant “chaos” during an era of political repression; recovering Parsons's writings ultimately will extend this anarchy into the archives and canons of the present.