anarchy archives

An Online Research Center on the History and Theory of Anarchism

Home

Search

About Us

Contact Us

Other Links

Critics Corner

   
 

The Cynosure

  Michael Bakunin
  William Godwin
  Emma Goldman
  Peter Kropotkin
  Errico Malatesta
  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
  Max Stirner
  Murray Bookchin
  Noam Chomsky
  Bright but Lesser Lights
   
  Cold Off The Presses
  Pamphlets
  Periodicals
   
  Anarchist History
  Worldwide Movements
  First International
  Paris Commune
  Haymarket Massacre
  Spanish Civil War
  Bibliography
   
   
   

Life of Albert Parsons

<--Previous  Up  Next-->

p61

about to rise!" and that I was their leader! No one spoke to or molested me. I was unknown. The next day and the next the strikers gathered in thousands in different parts of the city without leaders or any organized purpose. They were in each instance clubbed and fired upon and dispersed by the police and militia. That night a peaceable meeting of 3,000 workingmen and dispersed on Market Street, near Madison. I witnessed it. Over 100 policemen charged upon this peaceable mass-meeting, firing their pistols and clubbing right and left. The printers, the iron-molders, and other trades unions which had held regular monthly or weekly meetings of their unions for years past, when they came to their hall-doors now for that purpose, found policemen standing there, the doors barred, and the members told that all meetings had been prohibited by the Chief of Police. All mass meetings, union meetings of any character were broken up by police, and at one place (Twelfth Street Turner Hall), where the Furniture-Workers Union had met to confer with their employers about the eight-hour system and wages, the police broke down the doors, forcibly entered, and clubbed and fired upon the men as they struggled pell-mell to escape from the building, killing one workman and wounding many others.

The following day the First regiment, Illinois National Guards, fired upon a crowd of sight-seers, consisting of several thousand men, women, and children, killing several persons, none of whom were ever on a strike as Sixteenth street viaduct.

For about two years after the railroad strike and my discharge from the Times office I was blacklisted and unable to find unemployment in the city, and my family suffered for the necessaries of life.

The events of 1877 gave great impulse and activity to the labor movement all over the United States, and, in fact, the whole world. The unions rapidly increased both in number and membership. So, too, with the Knights of Labor. In visiting Indianapolis, Ind., to address a mass-meeting of workingmen on the Fourth of July, 1876, I met the State Organizer, Calvin A. Light, and was initiated by him as a member of the Knights of Labor, and I have been a member of that order ever since That organization had no foothold, was in fact unknown, in Illinois, at that time. What a change! To-

This page has been accessed by visitors outside of Pitzer College times since September 12, 2001.

OWN YOUR OWN COPY OF ANARCHY ARCHIVES

[Home]               [Search]               [About Us]               [Contact Us]               [Other Links]               [Critics Corner]