ARTIST'S STATEMENT: Biographies & reflections on figures represented in the "Named For..." series
written by Kate Javens

 

LUCY PARSONS

Lucy Parsons was a powerful orator, and tireless advocate for the disenfranchised in America. She identified the devastating class disparity as the most significant obstacle to the fair development of the industrializing nation of her day.

Lucy Parsons was born in 1853, in the Civil War Era in Texas, probably as a slave; little information is available about her early life. Of African, Native, and Mexican American heritage, she went by several surnames until she married Albert Parsons in 1870. After her husband was executed in the Haymarket Affair, she continued a life-long commitment to advocacy for the poor. Her speeches were so threatening to authorities, that she was often arrested before she reached the podium, and was described by the Chicago police as, “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”.

Lucy Parsons died in a house fire, at 89.

”. . . I believe that if every man and every woman who works, or who toils in the mines, mills, the workshops, the fields, the factories and the farms of our broad America should decide in their minds that they shall have that which of right belongs to them, and that no idler shall live upon their toil . . . then there is no army that is large enough to overcome you, for you yourselves constitute the army . . . .”

[Speech is found in the official Minutes of the 1905 IWW Convention in Chicago from a copy found at the Tamiment Library of New York University's Bobst's Library, and is slightly edited for clarity] Copyright 2004 by William Loren Katz [williamlkatz.com]

I’ve named the swallows for Lucy Parsons.

See additional info on Lucy Parsons:
The Lucy Parsons Project
LucyParsons.org

ANDREW FURUSETH

Born March 12th, 1854, Furuseth's life was devoted to protecting the ordinary seaman. Founder of the American Seamen's Union and Secretary of the Sailor's Union of the Pacific from near its inception in 1880s, Furuseth spent 19 years lobbying congress to pass the American Seamen's Act. He lived and died in poverty.

When threatened with a jail sentence for a labor injunction, he said:

"They can't put me in a smaller room than I've always lived in.
They can't give me plainer food than I've always eaten.
They can't make me any lonelier than I've always been." *
* Paul S. Taylor, Sailors Union of the Pacific, 1923

When I saw a Dorothea Lange portrait of this beautiful man, I was struck by the crow-ness of his visage. A year and a half after, I found a dead crow on the ground, still warm. I bent over him and said "Hello Andrew".

See additional info on Andrew Furuseth

 

BENJAMIN DREW

A Boston abolitionist, Drew traveled to Upper Canada in the 1850's to transcribe word for word the stories of American fugitives, (some freed, mostly runaways) to compile a book, "The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada Related by Themselves". It contains scores of interviews, some very difficult to read as they recount horrific abuse. But, at the core they are simple tales of journey; they are step-by-step stories of "I got here from there".

Reference the first line of each paragraph 5 through 8 of William A. Hall (alias):

5 I went on to within five miles of Mount Vernon…
6 He walked a mile and a quarter with me, to a neighbor of his called-- there came
out three men…
7 When I awoke, the sun was up, and people were feeding the horses in the
stable…
8 I took directions from Bloomington,-but the directions were wrong, …"

Artless and practical, it's an archetype of history. Even though Drew was not a journalist in the strict modern sense, (you can recognize a pattern that might hint directional questioning) it's probably the nearest thing we have to that kind of objectivity, and there is our debt. One can only imagine the huge effort of this feat at that time.

I chose the horse to personify Drew because I think of the animal as a symbol of "journey", like a locomotive.

 

DERRICK BELL

The series of bull paintings are named for Derrick Bell, former Weld Professor of Law at Harvard. Bell is the author of Race, Racism, and American Law; Faces at the Bottom of the Well; And We are Not Saved, as well as a score of lectures on the topic of race and law. I chose a bull to personify him for its visual weight and symbolic gravity.

Bell is the only living person for whom I've named work. We had a residency together at the MacDowell Colony in 1998. He was working on a book of memoirs.

See additional info on Derrick Bell

 

LEARNED HAND

1872-1961, U.S. Federal Court Judge

Hand received his law degree from Harvard in 1896. He was a judge of the U.S. District Court for New York's Southern District (1909-24) and of the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals (1924-51). Often called the “tenth justice of the Supreme Court,” and regarded as one of the finest jurists in American history, Hand delivered more than 2,000 opinions, and was noted especially as a defender of free speech. He is the author of The Spirit of Liberty, a collection of papers and addresses (1952), and of The Bill of Rights, a series of lectures (1958).

I chose the redwinged blackbird because it's common, fierce, and smart. Also, it has a call so guttural and complex as to be inimitable.

"' I beseech ye in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken. P. xxiv.'

These words Judge Hand said he would like to have written 'over the portals of every church, every courthouse and at every crossroads in the nation.' For, he added, 'it seems to me that if we are to be saved it must be through skepticism.' " (spoken to "Spencer R. McCulloch, Post-Dispatch special writer, as the key to his over-all philosophy)

 

OSCAR NEEBE
ALBERT PARSONS
LOUIS LINGG

Defendants, HAYMARKET TRIALS (Often referred to as the Haymarket Affair, as events leading to the trials, and the trial aftermath, are so consequential in American history).

A gross synopsis: 1886- Fledgling labor movement is trying to take hold within the cataclysmic growth of urbanizing, industrializing America. A bomb is thrown during a labor rally in Chicago (Haymarket Square). Source of the bomb is still unknown. Eight labor activists were the eventual defendants. Albert Parsons was among them only because, when he heard of the seven arrested, he turned himself in in solidarity; it cost him his life. Five men were sentenced to hang, Parsons and Spies among them. The convicted deliver three days of speeches to the court. These are amazing testaments to the state of the country at the time.

Oscar Neebe, a yeast peddler, was sentenced to fifteen years hard labor, and six years later pardoned by the next governor of Illinois, Altgeld. (a move that severely compromised Altgeld's political future). I chose the bison to personify Neebe for its archetypal american-ness, and for its intense herding instinct.

Read the full text of Oscar Neebe's speech from the trials

The fish (Parsons, Lingg) are part of a series portraying all of the hanging defendants.

Albert Parsons bio (from The Seminar in Famous Trials course at the University of Missouri-K.C. School of Law):

Albert Richard Parsons (1848-1887): Descendant of a noted New England family, Parsons was born in Alabama and raised in Texas. In the Civil War, he served as a confederate soldier in the cavalry commanded by his brother, Maj. Gen. William H. Parsons. After the war, he abjured his Confederate ideas, served in the Reconstruction government of Texas, then went to Chicago and became a labor leader. He rejected conventional political action and became an anarchist. Parsons was one of the speakers at the Haymarket meeting and had left well before the explosion. He evaded arrest, but joined his comrades in the courtroom on the first day of the trial, which cost him his life.

There is so much to be said, and so much already written about, the Haymarket affairs that I would refer all those with interest to the Library of Congress and their comprehensive website; it includes original transcription of trial events.