Haymarket Anarchists Executed (1887)

Fri Nov 11, 1887

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The Haymarket Affair is the name given to the bloody aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4th, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day and turned into a massacre after an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police.

In the internationally publicized legal proceedings that followed, eight anarchists were convicted of conspiracy. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison. Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted two of the sentences to terms of life in prison; another committed suicide in jail rather than face the gallows.

On this day in 1887, the remaining four defendants, George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons, and August Spies, were hanged. At the gallows, they sang the “Marseillaise”, then the anthem of the international revolutionary movement. Family members who attempted to see them for the last time, including notable anarchist Lucy Parsons, were arrested.

According to witnesses, in the moments before the men were hanged, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.” Parsons then requested to speak, but he was cut off when the signal was given to open the trap door.