Albert R. Parsons, an anarchist and militant labor advocate, was one of four men executed following the 1886 Haymarket bombing in Chicago. Parsons was born in Montgomery, Alabama, into a family of colonial ancestry and, after both parents died, was raised by an older brother in Texas. At age eleven he was apprenticed to a printer, but his indenture was interrupted by military service for the Confederacy in the Civil War. After the war Parsons held positions with several newspapers and with the federal government's Internal Revenue Bureau. In 1871 he married Lucy E. Gonzalez. They were the parents of two children, Albert R. Jr. and Lulu Eda Parsons.
Settling in Chicago in 1873, Parsons resumed the printing trade and joined the Typographical Union. His first serious interest in radical movements stemmed from efforts to reform Chicago's Relief and Aid Society. The Society was responsible for administering relief programs connected with the great Chicago fire, but radical and working people's groups charged that it provided money for speculators while denying aid to poor people. After this experience, Parsons and his wife both became increasingly active in labor and radical circles. He joined the Social Democratic Party of America in 1875, the Knights of Labor in 1876, and in 1877 lost his job with the Chicago Times because of activities during the railway strike. During this period he also ran for several public offices on the ticket of the Workingmen's Party of the United States. By 1883 Parsons' dissatisfaction with political action led him to adopt anarchism. In 1884 he became editor of the Alarm, the English language organ of the radical-socialist International Working People's Association.
Albert Parsons was one of the speakers at the May 4, 1886 rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square. The rally grew out of the eight-hour day movement and was called specifically to protest the shooting of several strikers by police outside the McCormick Harvester factory on May 3. Although the bomb thrower was never identified, Parsons and nine others, including well-known radicals and other speakers at the rally, were charged with the murder of a policeman who died in the blast. During the highly publicized trial which followed, Lucy Parsons undertook extended speaking tours to build support and raise money for the defendants. The verdict, however, was guilty, and after an unsuccessful appeal and attempts to gain a pardon from the governor, Parsons and three others were hanged on November 11, 1887.
Additional biographical information can be found in the Dictionary of American Biography, Life of Albert R. Parsons by Lucy Parsons (Chicago, 1889), and Labor Agitator by Alan Calmer (New York, 1937).
