Some people sit on the spiral park bench not realizing it’s an artwork about one of Chicago’s most remarkable heroines. They may not be aware of it, but the bench is talking to them, asking them questions. Other people passing through Wicker Park stop to read the words pressed into hundreds of ceramic tiles, in English, Polish, and Spanish; interested readers start at one end of the bench and follow the words to the middle of the spiral, then double back along the outer edge leading the other way.
After talking to Herb, the questions on the bench are particularly poignant: Have you ever heard of Lucy Parsons? Why have most of us never heard of Lucy Parsons? Why are people who are poverty stricken blamed for their situation? Why don’t we know much about our labor history? Who are the powerful women you know? What would cause you to fight injustice?
When they came to Chicago in the winter of 1873, the nation was in the midst of a depression, and the city was still reeling from the Great Fire two years before. The rising tide of industrialism helped Chicago’s factory owners, but it granted them tremendous power over the pool of labor, which was swelling daily as immigrants and rural farmers flocked into the city looking for work. Competition for jobs was tough. New arrivals were often penniless and completely dependent on their employers. Their only asset was their labor, but the actions of industrialists sent a clear message that it wasn’t valued. The boom times of the Civil War had lowered wages because factories started to employ large numbers of women and children; “women’s wages,” about half of what men had earned, became the going rate for everyone. The same month Albert and Lucy Parsons came to Chicago, 10,000 gathered at City Hall to protest the actions of the Relief and Aid Society, an agency set up to distribute several million dollars among the homeless and needy after the fire. A few members of its board, including Marshall Field and George Pullman, saw fit to siphon off relief cash to loan to their companies at low interest rates.
Known for her dramatic delivery, she regularly made speeches that attracted large crowds. Even in the midst of all the hysterical rhetoric coming from both the affluent and the anarchists, Lucy Parsons could not be outdone. The Tribune quoted one of her speeches: “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination without pity. Let us devastate the avenues where the wealthy live as Sheridan devastated the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah.”
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In the fall of 1885, while Albert was organizing coal miners in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lucy Parsons led a Thanksgiving Day “Poor People’s March.” The newly formed Illinois National Guard was training a few miles away. “Why is the militia drilling, doing riot drill in time of peace?” Lucy asked. “Are the money mongers so frightened over their evil deeds that they fear they will soon reap the fire of social revolution? Do they propose to shoot working people down in cold blood for no more crime than that they are hungry–their children sick?” The marchers headed south to Prairie Avenue, where they rang doorbells and insulted the wealthy industrialists.
Two months later, all eight men were found guilty of murder; five were eventually sentenced to death–Parsons, Spies, Fischer, George Engel, and Louis Lingg (who allegedly committed suicide in his cell). Poverty forced Lucy and her two children to move from an Indiana Street apartment to a third-floor flat at 1129 N. Milwaukee Ave. She supported her family by sewing and by selling Haymarket-related pamphlets on street corners for a nickel apiece. She traveled throughout the U.S. speaking in defense of the workers’ movement and the condemned men, raising money for their appeals.
Woodruff earned an MFA in ceramics from Northern Illinois University in 1986, and she remained in De Kalb for two more years, teaching English as a second language. She moved to Chicago in 1989 under an Illinois Arts Council artist-residency program and began working with community organizations through the city’s Neighborhood Arts Assistance Program. In May 1991 the Chicago Commons Association hired Woodruff to lead ceramics workshops for kids in the Miles Square Head Start and day-care programs at the Henry Horner Homes. Woodruff tells how classroom activity was often interrupted by the sound of gunfire outside.
