Lucy Parsons was one of the most remarkable people in American political life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, though her name has been lost to mainstream American history. Accordingly, her background is largely unknown. Most scholars believe she was born Lucy Gonzales Waller in 1853, though some sources say 1848. She spent time in Waco, Texas, and as a woman of Hispanic, Native American, and African American ancestry, it was likely that she had been enslaved. In the early 1870s, she married a white South Carolina radical, Albert Parsons, and together they became labor organizers in Chicago. In 1886 Albert was convicted as one of the alleged instigators of a riot in Haymarket Square in Chicago, where a homemade bomb killed seven policemen. It was left to Lucy to speak to groups of workers proclaiming her husband’s innocence in fomenting violence and calling for a new trial. She toured the country making speeches in favor of Albert’s cause and for the cause of anarchism; the speech excerpted here was one of the few that have survived, given to an audience of workers at Kansas City’s Kump Hall in December 1886 and reprinted in the Kansas City Journal. Most of the speech is a simple defense of the actions of anarchists at the Haymarket Affair. Yet at a time when being either Black or radical might get a person lynched at the slightest provocation, Lucy’s very existence as a public figure was an act of courage, let alone her advocacy for the interests of her husband and for all working people.