Labor Agitator: The Story of Albert R. Parsons (Ernest J. Wright copy)

Softcover 8vo, 126pp. Illustrated with evocative drawings by Mitchell Siporin. Good to Very Good with light soil and creasing to covers, half-inch loss to spine head, slight bend to the upper corner and general handling wear. Published around the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Haymarket Riot. From the foreword letter by Parsons' widow: "You have dug beneath the mountain of lies that has been heaped upon my husband and his comrades these fifty fleeting years, and without any attempt at "over? writing, have given the bare, cold facts, taken from the record, and proving that they were innocent of any bomb-throwing, and were simply lynched! to satisfy a howling mob of greedy capitalists, who would not be satisfied with less than their lives, who somehow thought by hanging those labor leaders they could crush the labor movement."From the library of J. Ernest Wright, his signature on the half title and occasional light pencil marks and dog-ears. Wright was a Pittsburgh writer and activist, head of the New Theater group which staged political works at the Labor Lyceum in Pittsburgh's Hill District. An English professor laid off by the University of Pittsburgh, he was commissioned by the Federal Writers Project for The Negro in Pittsburgh? a history of African Americans in the Allegheny region intended for the American Guide Series, but that was among the many projects shut down when Congress ended funding in 1939. The book was relegated to the State Library archives until being published in 2004 in an edition edited by Laurence A. Glasco, The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh.