‘More enthusiasm and hearty concord it was never my pleasure to witness’: Lucy Parsons's Propaganda Tour of Britain, November–December 1888

Abstract

Lucy Parsons was one of the most famous radical orators of the United States, but little has been written about her visit to Britain. This article investigates Parsons's lecture tour of Britain in the winter of 1888, based on an invitation from the Socialist League to address meetings to commemorate the Haymarket Affair and tour the country to speak more broadly about the labour movement and working conditions in America. It considers the political lecture tour as a tool to conduct revolutionary activism at a crucial time in the development of the British socialist movement, while also understanding Parsons as a transnational anarchist activist and speaker in her own right. A widowed Black working-class woman activist of few means who navigated stages and territories which did not tend to welcome women of any colour, Parsons employed different rhetorical strategies to get her revolutionary message to as wide an audience as possible. Notwithstanding her pioneering role in crossing the Atlantic to deliver revolutionary propaganda to British audiences, in the political history of Black America Parsons remained a complicated and sometimes divisive figure for prioritizing issues of class over race. Nonetheless, over more than six decades on the political stage, Parsons was an extraordinary figure who articulated counter-hegemonic notions of internationalism.