Albert Parsons
American socialist and anarchist newspaper editor (1848–1887)
Albert Richard Parsons (June 20, 1848 – November 11, 1887) was an American left-wing newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. As a teenager, he served in the military force of the Confederate States of America in Texas, during the American Civil War. After the war, he became an activist for the rights of former slaves, and later a Republican official during Reconstruction. With his wife Lucy Parsons, he then moved to Chicago in 1873 and worked in newspapers. There he became interested in the rights of workers. In 1884, he began editing The Alarm newspaper. In 1887, Parsons was one of four Chicago radical leaders controversially convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair.
Early years
Parsons was born June 20, 1848 in Montgomery, Alabama. He was one of the ten children of the proprietor of a shoe and leather factory who had originally hailed from Maine.
Parsons described his ancestors as early English settlers, with the first Parsons family arriving at Narragansett Bay in what is now the state of Rhode Island in 1632.
The public source identifies “Albert Parsons” as american socialist and anarchist newspaper editor (1848–1887). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Albert, Parsons and American.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1718715. VIAF identifies the subject as 19686729. The Library of Congress control number is n87890506. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1848, 1887, 1873 and 1884.
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This entry incorporates text from “Albert Parsons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.