The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean by Tariq D. Khan

Author:Tariq D. Khan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Parsons did not believe in white saviors, however, nor did she believe in appealing to the morality of white people: “The white race furnished us one John Brown; the next must come from our own race.”30

More than half a century before Malcolm X and Kwame Ture ever gave a speech, Lucy Parsons argued that whites would never respect Black people as the result of appeals to white morality, but that power, not moral suasion, was the basis of respect. Black people, said Parsons, would gain the respect of white society when Black communities were strong and organized enough to make white oppressors dread them, and not before that. “For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.”31 After attending what she described as a “meeting of colored citizens” in Chicago, on March 27, 1886, in protest against lynchings, she was impressed that Black people were shifting away from appeals to Republican politicians, who had abandoned Reconstruction, toward community self-help and militant collective self-defense. White lynch mobs, she wrote, “are not only sowing the wind which they will reap in the whirlwind, but the flame which they will reap in the conflagration” and then, quoting one of the speakers at the meeting, she wrote, “Prepare for the crisis. God helps those who help themselves.”32 She was not wrong. In many cases during the Nadir and later, Black armed community self-defense became the dominant and most effective strategy—in contrast with moral suasion, legalism, or electoralism—to combat extralegal racial violence.33

As transnational poet Warsan Shire writes, the most common survival strategy for people who live in “the mouth of a shark” or “the barrel of a gun” is “to quicken your legs”: that is to say, migration.34 Though Albert Parsons, in his role as a Radical Republican, took part in armed action against white vigilantes, ultimately the forces of white reaction outnumbered and overwhelmed the forces of Reconstruction in Texas. Like millions of others in the crosshairs of Southern white vigilantes, Albert and Lucy Parsons “quickened their legs” north to join the ranks of the urban industrial working class. They arrived in Chicago in the winter of 1873–74. In Chicago’s migrant and refugee working-class neighborhoods, writes Ashbaugh, “Lucy would no longer have to fear rape by the Klan at every moment. She would have room to develop her own potential as a crusader for human rights.”35 The North, however, was no bastion of equality. They arrived just as the Panic of 1873 was ushering in the Long Depression. They were out of the mouth of a shark and into the jaws of a lion.

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