Biography
Albert Parsons was a former Confederate soldier turned radical labor organizer and editor of The Alarm, an English-language anarchist paper in Chicago. Although he had left town immediately after the Haymarket meeting, he voluntarily surrendered to stand trial with his comrades. He was hanged on November 11, 1887. His widow Lucy Parsons would go on to become one of the most influential anarchist organizers in American history.
On May 4, 1886, a rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square in support of an eight-hour workday and against the police killing of striking workers at the McCormick Reaper plant the previous day was nearing its end when an unknown assailant threw a bomb into a column of police advancing to disperse the crowd. The explosion and the police gunfire that followed killed seven officers and at least four civilians. Eight Chicago anarchist organizers were arrested and tried together for the bombing, although no evidence ever connected most of them to the device or the bomb-thrower. The 1886 trial, presided over by Judge Joseph Gary, was widely condemned at the time and since as a political prosecution. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887; one died in his cell the night before the executions. Three years later, on June 26, 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three surviving prisoners and issued a long public statement excoriating the trial as a miscarriage of justice. The case helped establish May 1 as International Workers' Day around the world.
Thurber Lewis retrospective May Day history identifies Parsons in cell 29 of Cook County Jail in August 1886 and quotes his jail account of organizing for the eight-hour movement and of the 1877 Chicago railroad strike repression. It identifies the November 11, 1887 hangings of Parsons, Fischer, Spies and Engel. The newspaper assertion that a police spy threw the Haymarket bomb is its attributed interpretation, not an established identification of the unknown bomber. The cell and prison-writing context add to the existing Haymarket case; no new admission day or custody total is inferred. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1932/v09-n102-sect-two-May-Day-apr-29-1932-DW-LOC.pdf#page=3
