Mother Jones at the White House, Washington, D.C.,
photographed September 26, 1924.
I’m not a humanitarian, I’m a hell-raiser. —Mother Jones
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I heard there might be a “National Garden of American Heroes” located somewhere in our nation’s capital, featuring life-size statues of 250 Americans.
The official list includes George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (of course!) but also Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, Emily Dickinson, Neil Armstrong, Muhammad Ali, Walt Disney, Samuel Gompers, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Babe Ruth, and Elvis Presley.
The honorees are remarkably diverse. Such diversity will certainly stir the ire of our president, who disdains DEI in all forms.
Oh wait, it’s his idea!
You gotta be kidding!
No, it’s true.
There are, of course, many notable omissions. Bo Jangles, Janis Joplin, and Harvey Milk.
And Mother Jones (1837–1930). “The Most Dangerous Woman in America.”
She was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland. The potato famine forced her family to flee and settle in Toronto. She trained to be a dressmaker and a teacher. She moved about—to Michigan, Chicago, and Memphis, where she married George Jones, a member of the International Iron Molders’ Union.
They had four children.
In 1867 her husband and all four children died of yellow fever. She returned to Chicago. Four years later her tiny dressmaking shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire.
She eked out a meager living for years, and then she found her calling. She became an itinerant union organizer. In 1877 she stood with the trainmen during the Great Railroad Strike in Pittsburgh.
She never looked back.
She became a spokesperson and organizer for the United Mine Workers and was jailed for protesting near a mine in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1902. She was known as “the Miners’ Angel.”
In 1903 she led a “Children’s March” from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt’s home in New York to highlight the need for child labor laws.
She never stopped marching, organizing, and speaking out.
Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.
If they want to hang me, let them. And on the scaffold I will shout, “Freedom for the working class!”
Today is Mother’s Day. Mother Jones is my American hero.
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Learn more about the “National Garden of American Heroes” and see all the honorees on Wikipedia.
