On May 4, 1886, fifteen thousand rioters joined for the Haymarket Affair rally on Desplaines Street in Chicago, Illinois. These rioters were workers who suffered through countless hours of working for low wages in the third year of a severe depression, creating independent organizations for workers’ rights. Now, these workers were demanding an eight hour work day with higher wages. As Chicago policemen attempted to break up the initially peaceful protest, a bomb was thrown at the police, killing seven of the policemen. The person responsible for the bomb was unidentified, but police arrested eight labor activists despite a lack of evidence. One of the accused anarchists was Albert Parsons--Lucy Parsons’ husband, who was hanged after he turned…show more content… When Albert Parsons returned from participating in General Lee’s army in Virginia, which was during the time he met Lucy Parsons, he possessed forty acres of corn ready for harvest and claimed that “I hired and paid wages (first they ever received) to a number of ex-slaves and together we reaped the harvest,” which caused Lucy Parsons to admire her husband because she was looked down on as a negro or mulatto, placed on the lower social class. However, she referred to herself as an American not by virtue but because of the birth generations of her ancestors in North America, resisting the efforts of journalists and officials to overlook her political views by characterizing her as a colored woman. Additionally, Albert Parsons stated that “In 1868, I founded a weekly newspaper in Waco, named The Spectator… in it, I advocated the acceptance in good faith, and in terms of surrender, and supported the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth constitutional amendments, securing political rights of the colored people.” During the time of The Spectator, it had been a decade since Albert and Lucy Parsons’ marriage, and considering that their marriage was not accepted due to restrictions of interracial marriage laws, Albert Parsons’ support for blacks in addition to laborers gave Lucy Parsons additional reasons to praise her