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Harpers, December 2017:
Dr. Dre didn’t like “Fuck tha Police” when Ice Cube first showed him the
lyrics. He wanted to make fun songs that you could play at a party. As
Kennedy explains: “Dre’s attitude about the song changed when he and
Eazy got busted by some cops for shooting paintballs at people and the
officers put guns to their heads.” Rhymes like “police think they have
the authority to kill a minority” haven’t aged a day. But as I learned
from Jacqueline Jones’s GODDESS OF ANARCHY: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LUCY
PARSONS, AMERICAN RADICAL (Basic Books, $32), “shoot to kill” was once
the Chicago Police Department’s policy against whites too. Between 1870
and 1920, homicides by police increased fivefold. Much of this violence
was directed against striking or protesting workers. The bullets,
however, did not always find their intended targets. An internal
investigation into the Haymarket riot of 1886, which left seven officers
and four workers dead, found that “the police emptied their revolvers,
mainly into each other.”
The events of Haymarket made Lucy Parsons a widow — her husband, Albert,
was hanged alongside three other anarchists in a spectacular miscarriage
of justice. The two had met in Waco, Texas, shortly after the Civil War.
Albert, a white man who as a teenager had served on the Confederate
side, was climbing the ranks of the Republican Party by agitating for
African-American rights; Lucy was born a slave in Virginia and was
brought west in 1863. (During the Civil War, some slaveholders migrated
to Texas, thinking that the Lone Stars would never bow to the Union.)
They married during a brief period when interracial unions were legal
and then moved to Chicago, where they embraced socialism, trade
unionism, and anarchism. Both rejected mainstream political parties and
the ballot box, refusing to vote even at Socialistic Labor Party
meetings. (They thought that groups should talk until achieving
consensus.) Lucy was a fierce orator and writer who rejected reform and
charity (“hush money to hide the blushes of the labor robbers”) and
roused large crowds with revolutionary talk (“Learn the use of
explosives!”). She wore a black dress and, around her throat, a gold
necklace with a gallows charm.
Goddess of Anarchy is meticulously researched. Yet Parsons, as a
character, remains inscrutable. Questions linger. Why did she say so
much on behalf of exploited whites and almost nothing about black
workers? Why did she tell reporters that she was Mexican and Indian? Why
did she have her son, whom she had once paraded before the press,
draping him in a red scarf and calling him “my brave little anarchist,”
committed to a mental hospital? She claimed that he threatened to stab
her with a knife, but she may have been more annoyed that he wanted to
enlist in the army. (At the trial, he accused her of wanting to steal
his property.) Albert Jr. languished in the Elgin Asylum for twenty
years, abused by the guards and by other inmates, until he died of
tuberculosis. Parsons criticized Emma Goldman for equating anarchism
with sexual liberation, and insisted that “family life, child life” were
the “sweetest words,” but her own maternal instincts were straight out
of a Grimm fairy tale.
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