Remembrance Days: Voltairine de Cleyre and the Haymarket Martyrs

Commemorating the Haymarket Martyrs

In my last post, “War, Remembrance and Propaganda,” I mentioned that for anarchists November 11th is also a day of remembrance, for it was on November 11, 1887 that four anarchists were executed in Chicago, wrongly convicted of throwing a bomb at a demonstration against police violence. One of those anarchists, August Spies, cried out as he was about to be hanged, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!” For decades after, anarchists the world over held tributes for the Haymarket Martyrs every November 11th. One of the most eloquent commemorators of the Haymarket Martyrs was the American anarchist, Voltairine de Cleyre. I included excerpts from de Cleyre’s writings on direct action and the Mexican Revolution in Volume One ofAnarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. In the excerpts below, from a…