MAY 1, 2026

₁ Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (AK Press, 2006), 140.

₂ Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces, trans. Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer (1989; W.W. Norton, 1991), 117.

₃ International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, https://www.sitesofconscience.org.

₄ Galeano, The Book of Embraces, 117–118.

₅ Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make, introduced by Studs Terkel and annotated by David Schmittgens and Bill Savage (1951; University of Chicago Press, 2011), 64.

₆ For many, the Red Scare is better known as McCarthyism and occurred in the late 1940s and 1950s to persecute communists and those adjacent. Historians long have noted that the wave of anti-leftist, anti-union persecution from the government happened during and after World War I. Hence, many refer to the former as the Second Red Scare and the latter as the First Red Scare. Still others rightly note that the “real” First Red Scare came in the wake of the Haymarket bombing, revealing a much longer – and more accurate – history of repression of labor and the left.

₇ James R. Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America ( Pantheon Books, 2006), 281–282; “A Peripatetic Statue Again Is Dedicated,” James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New Press, 1999), 154; “Five Haymarket Police Veterans Relive Tragedy,” Chicago Tribune, May 7, 1934, 8.

₈ Loewen, Lies Across America, 154.

₉ William J. Adelman, “The True Story Behind the Haymarket Police Statue,” in Haymarket Scrapbook, eds. Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986), 167–168.

₁₀ “Fallen Hero,” Chicago Tribune, May 15, 1927; “Pick New Site for Haymarket Police Statue,” Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1927; Loewen, Lies Across America, 154; “Haymarket Memorial Statue,” Chicago Cop, n.d. (probably 2014), https://chicagocop.com/history/memorials-monuments/haymarket-memorial-statue/. Michael Chuchro, who identifies as a long-time Chicago Police Officer, runs this website.

₁₁ “Haymarket Memorial Statue,” Chicago Cop.

₁₂ “Daley to Join Haymarket Square Rites,” May 1, 1966, 16, and “Haymarket Statue Bombed,” October 7 1969, 1, both Chicago Tribune; “Haymarket Memorial Statue,” Chicago Cop.

₁₃ “Haymarket Statue Bombed”; “The Haymarket Bombing,” October 8, 1969, 24; “Haymarket Bombing,” and “Police Groups Angered Over Haymarket Statue Bombing,” October 8. 1969, 38 [Barrett quote] all Chicago Tribune; Bill Ayers, “Weather Underground Redux,” April 20, 2006, https://billayers.org/2006/04/20/weather-underground-redux; Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: A Memoir (Beacon Press, 2001), 171; Berger, Outlaws of America, 108 (Braley quote); “Haymarket Memorial Statue,” Chicago Cop.

₁₄ Berger, Outlaws of America, 114.

₁₅ “Police Groups Angered”; Interview with Bill Ayers, by Peter Cole, April 15, 2025.

₁₆ Kathleen Cleaver, “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder,” The Black Panther 2, no. 6, September 14, 1968.

₁₇ “Haymarket Statue to be Rebuilt,” November 12, 1969, Chicago Tribune, 3; “Daley Asks for Law, Order at Haymarket,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1970, 39.

₁₈ “Bomb Haymarket Statue,” Chicago Tribune, October 5, 1970, 1; “Dynamite Radicals,” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1970, 14 [Weatherman spokesperson]; “Woman Tells How She Blew Up Monument,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 1970, 4.

₁₉ “Haymarket Riot Statue Move Sought,” Chicago Tribune, January 18, 1971, 37; “Moving Day Nears for Haymarket Statue,” Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1972, 101; “Haymarket Statue to Go Inside,” Chicago Tribune, January 25, 1972, 15; Loewen, Lies Across America, 155.

₂₀ “Haymarket Statue Moved,” Chicago Police Star Magazine, March 1972, 8; “Haymarket Memorial Journeys to New Home,” Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1976, 1; Loewen, Lies Across America, 155–156; “Monument on the Move,” Chicago History Museum, https://www.chicagohistoryresources.org/dramas/epilogue/toServeAndProtect/monumentOnTheMove_f.htm.

₂₁ “Patrolman Mathias J. Degan,” Chicago Cop, https://chicagocop.com/fallen-officers/patrolman-mathias-j-degan-star-648/. The timing of the final move, and refurbishment, might have been in response to realization of the Haymarket Memorial in 2004; see Jeff Schuhrke, “Chicago Never Forgot the Haymarket Martyrs,” Jacobin, May 1, 2023: https://jacobin.com/2023/05/haymarket-affair-martyrs-memorial-history-chicago-may-day

₂₂ The Illinois Labor History Society is the legal custodian of the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument. The ILHS has created many resources on this history and monument. Among them, Illinois Labor History Society and Historical Society of Forest Park, The Day Will Come: Honoring Our Working Class Heroes: Stories of the dedicated people buried near the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument, 3^rd ed. (Illinois Labor History Society, 2025); https://www.illinoislaborhistory.org/tour-introduction

₂₃ Bleue Benton, “Albert Weinert, Sculptor,” Haymarket Graves and Radical Row: Notes, April 14, 2018, https://haymarketgraves.blogspot.com/2018/04/albert-weinert-sculptor.html.

₂₄ Historical Society of Forest Park, https://www.forestparkhistory.org/haymarket.html. In 1997, the monument became a US National Historic Landmark.

₂₅ The Day Will Come, 17–48.

₂₆ In addition to decades of thankless work of the ILHS to uplift and preserve the history of the Haymarket, Orear and the ILHS helped preserve the Stone Gate of the Union Stockyards, designed by the legendary architects Daniel Burnham and John Root, and unveiled in 1879.

₂₇ Galeano, The Book of Embraces, 118.

₂₈ Jeff Huebner, “Haymarket Revisited,” Chicago Reader, December 9, 1993 , https://chicagoreader.com/news/haymarket-revisited/. Ellipses and parentheses in original.

₂₉ Michael VerMeulen, “Chicago Statuary: An unheralded heritage,” Chicago Tribune, 18 June 1976, 33; City of Chicago, “The Haymarket Memorial,”https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/chicago_s_publicartthehaymarketmemorial.html ; Stephen Kinzer, “In Chicago, an Ambiguous Memorial to the Haymarket Attack,” The New York Times, September 15, 2004: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/15/us/in-chicago-an-ambiguous-memorial-to-the-haymarket-attack.html

On October 4, 1970, Chicago’s Haymarket Police Monument – quite possibly the first statue in the United States dedicated to police – was attacked for the third time in three years. Two years prior, on the anniversary of the Haymarket Affair, May 4, antiwar protesters poured black paint on it after clashing with police. On October 6, 1969, the monument was blown up by the Weathermen (later, the Weather Underground), a new, ultra-radical group. An enraged Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the statue rebuilt and slated its unveiling for the following year’s anniversary. Five months after its reinstallation, the Weathermen announced, “A year ago we blew away the Haymarket pig statue at the start of a youth riot in Chicago. The head of the Police Sergeants’ Association called emotionally for an all-out war between the pigs and us. We accepted. Last night we destroyed the pig again.”¹ Daley had it repaired once more and placed under 24-hour police protection.

Public art matters, as evidenced by the battle between the Weathermen and Mayor Daley. That also explains why the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano lamented in 1989 that, “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.” Monuments signal what the dominant community believes worth remembering.²

In Chicago, as in cities worldwide, public art often promotes elitist, white supremacist, and even fascist ideals as opposed to their counterpoints – working-class visions of socialism, anarchism, antifascism, and antiracism. Yet monuments have been and remain sites of struggle. As the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience declares, “Remembering is a form of resistance.” What a community chooses to remember – or “forget” – is vital.³

Among other legacies, the Haymarket Affair inspired the creation of both US Labor Day (the first Monday in September) and International Labor Day (May 1), the latter celebrated in nearly every country around the world outside the United States. Galeano explained the irony:

May 1st is the only truly universal day of all humanity, the only day when all histories and all geographies, all languages and all religions and cultures of the world coincide. But in the United States, May 1st is a day like any other. On that day, people work normally and no one, or almost no one, remembers that the rights of the working class did not spring whole from the ear of a goat, or from the hand of God or the boss.⁴

In 1889, five years before the US Congress ordained Labor Day (intentionally not on May 1), the Haymarket Police Monument was unveiled in Haymarket Square and dedicated to the seven police killed three years earlier. This statue has been repeatedly vandalized, relocated, “accidentally” knocked over by a streetcar, and moved several more times before the Weathermen blew it to bits. It then was rebuilt and moved into different police facilities. It now guards the parking lot of the Chicago Police’s headquarters. It has become essentially invisible despite being in plain sight.

Six years after the deaths of five Haymarket martyrs, in 1893, the Pioneer Aid and Support Association, which counted Haymarket widow and activist Lucy Parsons among its number, unveiled the Haymarket Martyrs Monument. Located in Waldheim Cemetery just outside of Chicago – no city cemetery accepted the anarchists’ bodies despite their innocence – this monument might be the most well-known radical public artwork in the United States. Eugene Debs visited it in 1895, right after spending six months in prison for leading the mammoth Pullman strike. Ever since, the Haymarket Martyrs Monument has been a global pilgrimage site for many on the Left and in labor circles.

In 2004, the Haymarket Memorial – an attempt to thread the needle between right and left, literally and figuratively – was finally dedicated at the original Haymarket Square location. Soon after the Weathermen first blew up the police statue, a small but committed group of labor activists, which soon morphed into the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS), started discussing how to make such a memorial happen. When finally unveiled 35 years later, the Chicago Federation of Labor, unsurprisingly, supported the effort. Yet, shockingly, so did Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of Richard J. Daley) and Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police. To keep this broad coalition from splintering, compromises were made so that the monument’s central theme became free speech, which is to say those who peaceably assembled on May 4, 1886 had had theirs violated. A monument at the proper location, long overdue and benefitting from its location in the heart of the city, even with a tepid message that resists easy interpretation, it quickly became a popular destination, including on May Day.

The Haymarket Affair – the most dramatic, perhaps best-known event in US labor history – birthed three monuments and all have histories worth telling. This essay, however, will devote greatest attention to the first yet least well-known one, the police monument. Today, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument and Haymarket Memorial remain vital works of public art; equally apropos, the Haymarket Police Monument has all but disappeared from public view and public consciousness. Tracing their histories buttresses the claim of one of Chicago’s many great authors, Nelson Algren, who described his beloved adopted hometown as “Most radical of all American cities: Gene Debs’ town, Big Bill Haywood’s town, the One-Big-Union town.”⁵

The Haymarket Affair of 1886 proved the beginning of the end of the first American mass movement for the 8-hour day. Workers across the country – who typically toiled 10–12 hours per day, six days a week – organized a one-day strike on May 1, 1886, to force employers to institute an 8-hour workday. Hundreds of thousands struck, nowhere more so than in the country’s greatest industry city, Chicago. Some workers continued striking beyond May Day, including at Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Works where, on May 3, police killed four workers. In response, anarchists active in the 8-hour movement organized a protest meeting for the following day, May 4. The designated location, Haymarket Square, was a popular open-air market on the city’s near west side, then teeming with working-class residents.

As is widely known, rather than respect the mayor’s advice to go home, a police captain ordered 180 cops to shut down the peaceful meeting when, shockingly, a bomb was thrown into their advancing ranks. Ultimately, eleven people were killed, at least some from police bullets fired after the bomb blast. The Haymarket Affair quickly resulted in the most ferocious backlash against unionism and left radicalism the city and nation had ever seen, what some call the First Red Scare.⁶ Just weeks later, eight anarchists found themselves on trial for conspiracy to commit murder; a few months after that, they were found guilty and sentenced to death. None were the actual bomber. None had received anything close to a fair trial. Four were executed on November 11, 1887, one committed suicide the day prior, and the three others were sentenced to long prison sentences.

On the bombing’s third anniversary, the Haymarket Police Monument was unveiled in the bustling heart of Haymarket Square. Dedicated to the seven police killed, John Gelert’s bronze statue of a policeman with a raised arm stands atop a granite pedestal, its text declaring, “In the name of the people of Illinois, I command peace.” Businessmen’s clubs, along with Joseph Medill, publisher of the (still) anti-union Chicago Tribune, paid for it. Every year on May 4, an organization of Haymarket police veterans gathered at the statue and rededicated themselves to “law and order.”⁷

Also in 1889, at a Socialist International congress in Paris, a representative of the nascent American Federation of Labor suggested that May 1 be adopted as International Labor Day to honor the Haymarket martyrs and the injustices they experienced. The rest is history.

Back in Chicago, workers started demonstrating their dissatisfaction. As scholar James Loewen wrote, “Workers protested that this monument was one-sided and an affront.” Moreover, when the Haymarket Square Workers Memorial Committee proposed erecting a counter monument, the city refused. Loewen noted that, “Between 1889 and 1900, the police statue in Haymarket Square took abundant abuse from working-class Chicagoans.”⁸ Accordingly, in 1900 it was moved about a mile west, to the edge of Union Park (as in the federal union—not labor unions). Vandalism continued. Then, on May 4, 1927, a streetcar “jumped” the tracks and rammed the statue, knocking it off its pedestal. Several dozen people were injured. Streetcar driver William Schultz claimed that “the brakes failed as he was rounding the corner.” However, the timing – the Haymarket Affair’s anniversary –suggests otherwise. Labor studies professor and activist William Adelman much later wrote the driver “said he was sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised.”⁹ The statue was moved into Union Park, where it remained for almost thirty years, though it continued suffering from vandalism and theft of various pieces.¹⁰

The 1950s saw widespread urban redevelopment projects, including in Chicago, where a major part of the “run-down” Haymarket Square was wiped out. In 1957 the statue was relocated to the east side of the Randolph Street bridge, above the still-under-construction Northwest Expressway – renamed the John F. Kennedy Expressway soon after his assassination. Its new home was just 200 feet west of its original spot.¹¹ According to the Chicago Cop website, “years of vandalism” continued, causing the pedestal to become “badly stained and chipped.” On May 4, 1968, after antiwar demonstrators clashed with police, protesters poured black paint on the statue.¹²

The following year’s “Days of Rage” were three days of protests planned to “bring the war home” and served as the coming out party for the newly formed Weathermen. The night of October 6, 1969, they dynamited the monument: “a declaration of war,” according to member Scott Braley, which also was “how the police understood it.” The blast broke many windows in nearby buildings and pieces of the statue rained onto the Kennedy Expressway. No one was injured.¹³

The target was an obvious one for radicals because, as the Tribune editorial board noted, “The statue has long been venerated by Chicago policemen as a symbol of their dangerous calling.” Mark Rudd, a New York City-based member of the Weather Underground, later agreed: Chicago was chosen, he stated, “precisely because it has come to symbolize what a government held together by force is all about.”¹⁴

In a recent interview with Bill Ayers, another leader in the Weather Underground, explained further. “I didn’t know [the Haymarket Affair] growing up [in the Chicago suburbs, the child of the CEO of ComEd, a major utility corporation]. I learned about it around ’68.” He continued, “I don’t think it was a common conversation in the New Left…we were more focused…on the Black freedom struggle.” So how did Ayers and his comrades learn of the monument? “Chicago is a labor town, and that’s why [my] moving back to Chicago in ’69 was part of that relearning because…when you were…[at] demonstrations and actions and so on. Civil rights stuff, anti-war stuff. The old people were steeped in that labor history, and so we learned that kind of by osmosis.”¹⁵

Two months later and just a few miles away, Chicago police – with support from the Federal Bureau of Investigation – murdered Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, leaders in the Illinois Black Panther Party, while they slept. Like a modern-day Cassandra, Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver had predicted such killings in her 1968 essay “Racism, Fascism, and Political Murder”: “The advent of fascism in the United States is most clearly visible in the suppression of the black liberation struggle in the nationwide political imprisonment and assassination of black leaders coupled with the concentration of massive police power in the ghettos of the black community across the country.”¹⁶

Mayor Daley, enraged by the bombing, had ordered the statue rebuilt and reinstalled on the Haymarket’s anniversary. In a speech delivered to hundreds of police, Daley declared, “Let the younger generation know that the policeman is their friend.” Ironically, that same day, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students peacefully protesting the US war in Southeast Asia.¹⁷

On October 4, 1970, almost exactly one year after the first bombing, the Weather Underground blew the statue up again. In a call to the press, one member declared, “This is another phase of our revolution to overthrow our racist and fascist society. Power to the People.”¹⁸

Subsequently, police officers guarded the statue 24-hours a day, but the cost apparently was too high. Therefore, in 1972 the statue was moved to the lobby of Chicago Police Headquarters. The rationale was to save money but also – no less true if unspoken – so that it would be harder to blow up.¹⁹ Four years later, it was moved to the police academy, where it remained for more than thirty years. The pedestal was removed in 1996 to an unknown location, but in the concrete where the statue had once stood, someone scratched “LONG LIVE THE HAYMARKET MARTYRS.”²⁰

Finally, in 2007, the monument was moved again to Chicago Police Headquarters, which had since been relocated to Bronzeville, a predominantly Black Southside neighborhood. For 18 years and counting, it has stood in the parking lot, inaccessible and recognizable only to a few historical geeks, including this author.²¹

In 1893, the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument was dedicated in Waldheim (now Forest Home) Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois. That’s where, six years prior, the bodies of the Haymarket anarchists – four executed and one suicide – were buried in the presence of thousands. Ever since, workers and socialists from Chicago or visiting from around the world have paid their respects.²²

In 1886, the hysterical backlash to the Haymarket anarchists specifically as well as unionists and leftists generally had been swift and furious. The trial was widely considered to have been horribly biased – the judge, jury, and prosecution each in their own way – and no evidence was introduced directly linking any of the accused with the actual bombing. Instead, they were found guilty of “conspiracy” to incite some other, (still) unknown person. Meanwhile the popular, influential Tribune actively called for the anarchists to be found guilty and executed, and got the executions it demanded on November 11, 1887.

Given this context, it’s not surprising that no city cemetery allowed them to be buried. Waldheim, which in German means “Forest Home,” was founded as a German nondenominational cemetery in 1872 and located in a suburb on the western boundary of the city, about ten miles due west of the Haymarket Square. To this day, the cemetery continues to be quite diverse in its “membership,” including a large and growing number of Roma graves visible near the entrance.

Since the Haymarket martyrs were buried before the birth and growing popularity of May Day, those who honored them did so at Waldheim Cemetery on November 11, a wintry time in Chicago. This tradition continued for some years, though May Day eventually became a more popular day to visit.

Soon after the executions, the Pioneer Aid and Support Association was created, first, to help the families of the Haymarket martyrs, and then to construct a monument where they were buried. In 1891, the association announced a design contest, ultimately won by sculptor Albert Weinert. Born in Germany, Weinert immigrated to the US in 1886, of all years, and later moved to Chicago to work at the famed Columbian Exposition of 1893. As documented by ILHS leader Bleue Benton, the sculpture represents a scene from Franz Freiligrath’s German-language poem, “Die Revolution” in which “the hero is stricken dead by the tyrant in his mountain house, the daughter standing by his prostrate form in an attitude of supreme defiance – her right arm with clenched fist, crossed upon her breast, while with her left she bestows a wreath upon the brow of the prostrate form.”²³

The Troost Monument Company, hired for the job, purchased granite from Barre, Vermont – which boosts itself as the “Granite Capital of the World” thanks to a particularly high-quality granite, “Barre gray.” In the 1890s, Barre was home to many skilled stonecutters from Scotland, Spain, and especially northern Italy. Nearly all workers in this industry and town were union, and many of the Italian stonecutters were proud anarchists. 

The Haymarket Monument was dedicated on June 25, 1893, with thousands in attendance, many of whom had marched from the city. The monument includes two steps on which is carved “1887,” the year of the martyrs’ executions. There’s a 16-foot-high granite shaft with a carved triangular stone at the top. A bronze statue of a woman dramatically standing over the body of a fallen worker dominates the front side with August Spies’s legendary words stamped into the base: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voice you are throttling today.” The monument’s power, combined with the reality of the martyrs’ innocence, still burn holes into the hearts of many visitors.²⁴

One day after the unveiling, Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the three remaining Haymarket anarchists who, though they had not been executed, remained in prison. He cited the “malicious ferocity of the courts” as justification. This act by Altgeld, also a German immigrant, destroyed his political career. The text of Altgeld’s pardon is emblazoned in bronze on the back side of the monument.

Ever since, anarchists, communists, unionists, Spanish Civil War veterans, and others on the political left – especially Wobblies – have been buried near the martyrs in what now is called Radical Row, also cutely but inaccurately called “the Communist Block.” In 1905, less than two decades after the Haymarket Affairs, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded in Chicago; at their founding convention, many visited the memorial. Notably, one of the IWW’s founding members was Lucy Parsons, a Chicago resident until her death in 1942. The legendary Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill, executed by the state of Utah in 1915 for a murder he did not commit, asked people not to mourn for him but, instead, to organize. He arranged for his ashes to be distributed worldwide, including near the martyrs’ monument. So, too, the ashes of “Big” Bill Haywood, who chaired the Wobblies’ founding convention, which he called the “Continental Congress of the Working Class.” After jumping bail in 1921, Haywood ended up in the Soviet Union, where he later died; some of his ashes are in the Kremlin in Moscow, but the rest were scattered in Radical Row. Scores of other prominent and “ordinary” US leftists and unionists have also chosen to be buried alongside the martyrs, including Emma Goldman, William Z. Foster, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William L. and Louise Thompson Patterson, Ben Reitman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Franklin Rosemont, and Art Shields. Radical Row’s eternal residents partook in just about every meaningful working-class struggle in the United States from the 1880s to this day. The Haymarket Martyrs seem to have never died.²⁵

In 2004, after decades of effort among community, labor, and radical activists, the Haymarket Memorial was unveiled near the exact location of the Haymarket bombing. In 1968, a group of labor activists formed the Haymarket Workers Memorial Committee because they were angered that a Chicago union contributed funds to the repair of the police statue. Subsequently, on May Day, 1969, they organized a teach-in on the history of the Haymarket Affair, emceed by local celebrity Studs Terkel. Soon after, this group renamed itself the Illinois Labor History Society (ILHS). Frustrated by the fact that the only statue at the old Haymarket Square was dedicated to union-busters, they launched a campaign to create a pro-worker monument. In 1971, the last surviving member of the original Pioneer Aid & Support Association transferred the deed to the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument to the ILHS. Ably led for decades by Les Orear, a retired local activist in the once-mighty United Packinghouse Workers of America, and more recently by William J. Adelman and Larry Spivak, the ILHS has been the proud custodian of the Martyrs’ Monument ever since.²⁶

Eduardo Galeano was one of countless people who felt the void of absence caused by the city’s failure to properly commemorate the Haymarket Affair. In his essay, “Forgetting,” he described visiting Chicago in the 1980s:

Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.
“It must be around here,” they tell me. But nobody knows where.…
After my fruitless exploration of the Haymarket, my friends take me to the largest bookstore in the city. And there, poking around, just by accident, I discover an old poster that seems to be waiting for me, stuck among many movie and rock posters. The poster displays an African proverb: Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will glorify the hunter.²⁷

Chicagoans in and around the ILHS shared this view. In the words of Les Orear in 1993, “The business establishment has long forgotten it; it doesn’t give a rip anymore.” He continued, “It’s all a part of a deliberate amnesia…Our story is that Haymarket was a police riot — nobody did a damn thing till the police came. Their story is that [the incident] saved the city from anarchist terrorism.”²⁸

In 2004, with artist Mary Brōgger’s bronze sculpture, the Haymarket Memorial was finally dedicated, and located where the bombing occurred, albeit in a rather gentrified area. This City-commissioned monument justly receives attention, but struggles because of its confusing message. The dramatic sculpture features a person speaking atop a wagon, since one was used as the speakers’ platform during the historic open-air meeting, surrounded by a few other figures who might be helping defend the speaker and another who might be trying to pull them down. Brōgger’s work is dedicated to free speech – perhaps the one value that the Fraternal Order of Police, anarchists, second Mayor Daley, and dedicated folks at the ILHS could all agree upon.The ambiguity intentionally built into the monument, which might have made it palpable to conservative forces that otherwise might have resisted its creation, results in more than a few head scratches.

Ever since, the Haymarket Memorial is the place to be on May Day. There’s a ceremony with music and speeches, one highlight being the installation of plaques from unions along its base  – at least one being from a union based in another country. Galeano was clearly not alone in his appreciation for the deep significance of the Haymarket Affair. 140 years onward, this story still resonates among the working-class of the world.

Nelson Algren loved Chicago but, of course, also hated it. This “town of the hard and bitter strikes and the trigger happy cops…[and] undried blood on the pavement.” Algren wrote that Chicago remained a city with “many bone-deep grudges to settle,” none greater than the “big dark grudge cast by the four standing in white muslin robes, hands cuffed behind, at the gallows’ head. For the hope of the eight hour day,” i.e. the Haymarket Martyrs. As James Green added in his classic history Death in the Haymarket, “The erection of public monuments had sometimes provoked controversy in the past, but no city experienced a conflict as explosive as the one that erupted in Chicago over the memorial legacy of Haymarket Square.” The Haymarket Martyrs got a monument of their own in the cemetery where they rest, initiated and funded by working-class people—not “city fathers.” After a three-decade-long effort by labor historians and unionists, the Haymarket Memorial, located at the actual location, was installed in 2004. Justly receiving attention, it struggles because of the confusing, milquetoast message to free speech. Meanwhile “the most toppled monument in the United States,” to quote Loewen, is the one dedicated to the police. Since 1972, this statue literally has disappeared into what’s, at best, quasi-public spaces. Repeatedly attacked and relocated, it ignominiously defends a parking lot.²⁹

In short, Chicago’s workers built the Haymarket Martyrs Monument, successfully subverted the overtly authoritarian statue, and managed to create a monument to correct the record. That the police monument has been bombed several times and repeatedly vandalized, no doubt would have made Lucy Parsons proud.

In Earl Robinson’s classic song about Joe Hill, performed by the likes of Paul Robeson and Joan Baez, the listener is told, “Where working men are out on strike / Joe Hill is at their side.” But if you’re not on strike and happen to be in Chicago, head out to Forest Home Cemetery to pay respects to Hill, the rest of those buried in Radical Row, and of course, the Haymarket Martyrs.