Lucy Parsons' park followup

the Chicago Police seem to still have some sort of grudge against Lucy Parsons, from 1887!

From SunTimes
Supporters urge Park District to honor anarchist

Scholars, labor activists and free speech lovers Wednesday voiced support for a Chicago Park District proposal to name a Northwest Side lot for anarchist Lucy Parsons.

The head of the Chicago Police union has objected to naming the undeveloped lot at 4712 W. Belmont for Parsons, the wife of a man executed for the 1886 Haymarket bombing and riot that resulted in the deaths of eight police officers. Until her death in a 1942 house fire, Parson clashed with cops over labor demonstrations and publically dismissed officers as "organized bandits'' and "minions of the oppressing class.''

Mark P. Donahue, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police, did not testify at a hearing at the Kilbourn Park field house, 3501 N. Kilbourn. He has complained in a letter to the Park District board, and in comments to reporters, that Parsons "promoted the overthrow of the government and the use of dynamite in getting [her] way.''

The animosity is long-standing: A century ago, a police official said Parsons "was more dangerous than a thousand rioters.''

But William J. Adelman, a University of Illinois professor emeritus and author of Haymarket Revisited, told the park board that Parsons was less concerned with overthrowing the government than getting "the government off our backs.'' In that sense, he said, she was like Ronald Reagan.

and

In a written statement, Leslie F. Orear, president of the Illinois Labor History Society, described how Parsons led a march of unemployed and was "roughly intercepted'' by police and jailed in 1915.

"Instantly, it became a celebrated legal struggle over the rights of demonstrators to make public their issues in the streets of the city, without prior permission of the police,'' said Orear.

"Lucy Parsons said some things the Chicago Police Department didn't like. Our Constitution says we have the right to say those things,'' said Bob Matter of Hammond, a retired programmer. "She was continually shut down by the Chicago Police Department her whole life whenever she tried to speak. Now, the Chicago Police are trying to shut her memory down.''

and from the Trib, a brief blurb

Commissioners also heard from six people who support naming a park after Lucy Parsons, a labor organizer who was married to a man who was convicted and executed after the Haymarket Riot of 1887.

Mark Donahue, president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, has opposed naming the park after Parsons, calling her an anarchist. But Mayor Richard Daley has supported the park name, noting her efforts at social reform.

Now playing in iTunes: Fables Of Faubus, from the album Mingus Ah Um by Mingus, Charles (released 1959)