Lucy Parsons bio reveals new facts about the birth, ethnicity of the ‘Goddess of Anarchy’

Lucy Parsons, an anarchist firebrand who was one of the most enigmatic Chicagoans ever, might fit in better today than she did during her own time a century ago.

She was a black woman married to a white man. Scandalous then, no big thing now.

She favored an eight-hour workday and a social safety net, positions that made her a radical in the late 1800s but would qualify her for Congress today.

And Parsons had another trait of today’s politicians: She was a merchant of misinformation.

“Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical” is an important new biography by University of Texas historian Jacqueline Jones that fact-checks Parsons’ made-up details about her own background, correcting errors existing in virtually every biographical sketch ever written about this amazing woman.

Leftists who have celebrated Parsons as the quintessential multiethnic class warrior — of African-American, Latina and Native American descent — may be disappointed to learn that Jones’ book debunks the claim that she had any Mexican or Native American blood. Parsons always denied that she was black — or “mulatto,” as some put it — and promoted the myth that she was a “Spanish-Indian maiden” to explain her exotic looks while denying her African-American roots.

Parsons also claimed that she was born in Texas — an assertion accepted by almost everyone but disproved by Jones’ research. In fact, Parsons was born into slavery in Virginia and was taken as a teenager to Texas. Once there, she gave birth to a child who …

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