The Lucy Parsons Project is an online educational resource designed to publicize the life of Lucy Parsons and the struggles she championed.

There is a rich and vibrant history of anarchist, labor and racial and gender struggles for social change which have been ignored by conventional histories of the United States. Lucy Parsons, a poor woman of color who took great risks engaging in revolutionary worker-led movements for justice, is a part of this enormous history. She is a unique figure even within the anarchist movement, as one of the only known African American anarchist women of her era. Many of the struggles in which she took part are responsible for the freedoms and privileges Americans enjoy today. The fight for the 8-hour workday, for example, led to the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which guarantees minimum wage and overtime pay and prohibits child labor in the USA. Yet there is very little information available about Lucy Parsons or the movements of her era, although her legacy continues to grow.

When this web site was created in 2003 there was only one full length biography about Lucy Parsons: Lucy Parsons, American Revolutionary written by Carolyn Ashbaugh, and published by Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. in 1976, but it had been out of print for 27 years (it was was eventually reprinted in 2013 by Haymarket Press). Since then 2 more books about Lucy Parsons have been published: Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity, Writings and Speeches, 1878-1937 by Gale Ahrens with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2004), and The Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones (2017).

Lucy Parsons appeared in Latina Style magazine in 2003 in an article titled "Our Hidden Story" by Julia Young. In 2004 she was featured in Latina magazine in a full-page article titled "a fiery crusader". She has been written about in The Haymarket Tragedy by Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Scrapbook, and other writings about anarchist, socialist, communist, labor, and black feminist history.

In Boston, the Lucy Parsons Center has successfully operated a bookstore and meeting space in her name since 1992. In 2004, the city of Chicago designated one of its public spaces as Lucy Parsons Park, a 0.32 acre gathering place for community residents of all ages. The park still exists today.

In 2016, Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL) was founded to expose the surveillance overreach by governments and corporations. And since 2018, the Alliance for Global Justice has operated the The Lucy Parsons Popular Human Rights School, an initiative offering 7-week courses aimed at educating and empowering individuals in social justice, human rights, and community organizing.

The Lucy Parsons Project was launched on June 9, 2003. It was last updated on October 2, 2024.

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This web site created and maintained by JusticeDesign: Graphic Design for Social Change.