The blog is devoted in general to a loving evocation of late 19th century radicalism, but the entry on Lucy Parsons is particularly tasty:
http://anachro-anarcho.blogspot.com/2011/06/lucy-parsons-so-badass-it-took-89-years.html
Lucy Parsons: So Badass it Took 89 Years and a Fire to Stop Her
Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons was born a slave, in Texas, in 1853. So she's automatically tougher than you, right off the bat. Let there be no mistake about that. Strap in, though, because her life didn't get a whole lot easier from there.
She married a white former Confederate soldier, named Albert Parsons in 1871. The marriage wasn't legal, since he was white, and they were in Texas, in, as I may have mentioned, 1871, but Lucy Parsons wasn't going to let a little thing like that stop her, and she married the hell out of him anyway, because he was almost as awesome as she was, and after being a slave, Lucy had probably had entirely enough of people telling her what to do to last her the rest of her goddamn life, thank you very much. The two soon found that Reconstruction-era Texans did not take kindly to marriages between white men and women of mixed black, Native American, and Mexican ancestry, who were, by the way, campaigning together for an end to racial segregation and restrictions on interracial marriage. At all. Lucy's husband was working to register black voters when he was shot in the leg and threatened with lynching, whereupon the couple decided, quite understandably, that they had had about enough of Texas. In 1873, they moved to Chicago.
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