The Ongoing Legacy of the Haymarket Affair: Debates of Vilification and Celebration As Represented by Monumentation

Lucy Albert Parsons represent one of the most highly contested legacies in American history. Anarchists, like the Parsons couple, had been advocating for violence as strategy, and had been instructing people how to build bombs. The Haymarket Affair was the explosion of these tensions as police officers and bystanders were killed by an unknown bomb thrower in Haymarket Square. The government responded by taking down the anarchist leaders. This included Albert Parsons who was at the scene of the crime, but was not seen throwing the bomb. Those anarchists were seen as terrorists because of their constant encouragement of bomb throwing and uprisings. In November 1887, four leaders of the anarchist movement were hanged as they were cited as indirectly throwing the bomb. The infamous trial was considered unfair and biased by some, even as it was happening. Governor John Altgeld pardoned the remaining three Haymarket accused men in 1893. Lucy was an activist in her own right, but experienced harassment and encouragement by the public in the fifty-five years after her husband’s death. Yet despite the examples of domestic terrorism by the Parsons couple, their memory is commemorated in the twenty-first century. In 2004, despite objections by the CFOP and others, a Chicago park was named after her. By 2025, there are monuments, statues, and more public things commemorating the work of those Chicago anarchists. Comparing primary sources from the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, shows the ongoing debate about their commemoration. Newspaper articles while Parsons was alive were just as conflicting as they have been in the twenty-first century, with some depicting her as a dangerous anarchist while others depict her as a fighter for labor rights. Her race is still debated as she claimed to be of Mexican and Native American heritage (although she did not speak Spanish) while it is thought she was born a slave in Texas. Despite this, her claims to Mexican, Native and African American heritage have adopted as a champion for women of color in the twenty-first century. From the time of their lives to their deaths, to the present day, the Parsonses have had a complicated history with public perception. While Albert was found guilty for the Haymarket bombing and later hung, he was acquitted less than a decade later. Nobody was ever found definitively guilty for the bomb throwing. This uncertainty over the true bomb-thrower has led to unresolved public sentiment. The legacy of the Parsonses and the Haymarket Affair are reflective of ongoing debates over free speech, right to assemble, police presence, government interference, and labor rights. Similar to the issues of the Parsons’s time, present day Chicago still debates how to acknowledge them, they helped accomplish major rights for workers, while also acknowledging the violence they insighted. This paper looks at the conflicting legacy of the Lucy and Albert Parsons, the Haymarket Affair, and the police officers there as started in 1886 and continued today.