Haymarket

On the night of May 4, 1886, during a peaceful demonstration of labor activists in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a dynamite bomb was thrown into the ranks of police -trying to disperse the crowd. The officersimmediately opened fire, killing a number of protestors and wounding some two hundred others.

Albert Parsons was the best-known of those hanged; Haymarket is his story. Parsons, humanist and autodidact, was anex-Confederate soldier who grew up in Texas in the 1870s, and fell in love with Lucy Gonzalez, a vibrant, outspoken black woman who preferred to describe herself as of Spanish and Creole descent. The novel tells the storyof their lives together, of their growing political involvement, of the formation of a colorful circle of co-conspirators-immigrants, radical intellectuals, journalists, advocates of the working class-and of the eventsculminating in bloodshed. More than just a moving story of love and human struggle, more than a faithful account of a watershed event in United States history, Haymarket presents a layered and dynamic revelation of latenineteenth-century Chicago, and of the lives of a handful of remarkable individuals who were willing to risk their lives for the promise of social change.