Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Flynn entered public life at age 15, when she was arrested immediately after delivering her first speech, "What Socialism Will Do for Women," at the Harlem Socialist Club in 1906. Her parents had steeped her in stories of the Irish freedom struggle and introduced her to socialist ideas; she left Morris High School in the Bronx without graduating (some sources say she was expelled for her political activity) and became a full-time IWW organizer. The novelist Theodore Dreiser dubbed the teenage firebrand the "East Side Joan of Arc."

Flynn's fighting character emerged most sharply in the IWW free-speech fights of 1909–1910 in Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington. In Missoula, when city authorities banned street speaking, IWW organizers adopted the "fill the jail" tactic, getting arrested in waves until the city ran out of cells, with Flynn helping to lead the campaign. In October 1909, Missoula relented and recognized the right to speak.

Flynn then moved to Spokane, where the confrontation turned even more explosive. The city had banned IWW speeches that criticized employment agencies fleecing migrant workers with fee scams. Hundreds of Wobblies poured into Spokane and packed the jails. Flynn herself was arrested and imprisoned. From inside, she leveled a devastating charge: the police were running the jail as a de facto brothel, exploiting women prisoners. The accusation, published in the IWW newspaper the Industrial Worker, caused an uproar. Spokane officials tried to confiscate every copy of the issue. Public outrage forced the city to hire a female prison matron, and on March 4, 1910, Spokane capitulated, granting the IWW the right to hold street meetings and releasing all protestors. Flynn was 19 years old.

The Missoula and Spokane victories cemented the IWW's national reputation and laid the foundation for Flynn's emergence, just two years later, as the "spirit of the Lawrence strike." The figure immortalized in Joe Hill's 1915 song "The Rebel Girl", young, beautiful, fearless, jail-going, and utterly devoted to the working class, was forged in these street battles of the Pacific Northwest.

The decisive moment that brought Flynn national prominence was the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile strike of January 1912. When over 20,000 immigrant workers, more than 51 nationalities, largely women, walked out against a wage cut tied to a reduction in working hours, the IWW dispatched Flynn and Bill Haywood to lead the strike after police framed Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti for the murder of striker Anna LoPizzo. Flynn's most brilliant contribution was the 'Children's Exodus': to relieve starving strikers' families, she organized the evacuation of hundreds of children to sympathetic homes in New York City, Philadelphia, and Vermont. On February 10, 119 children arrived in Manhattan to a cheering crowd of 5,000, an image that shifted national opinion toward the strikers. But on February 24, when another 100 children prepared to leave for Philadelphia, police and militia clubbed mothers and children at the train station, dragging them away; one pregnant mother miscarried. The violence triggered Congressional hearings that exposed shocking mill conditions: a third of textile workers died before age 25, half of children before age six. On March 12, the American Woolen Company conceded a 15% wage increase and most other demands. Throughout the strike, Flynn led speeches, food distribution, picket organizing, and children's committees. She was 21 years old. Journalist Mary Heaton Vorse called her 'the spirit of the strike.' The experience inspired Joe Hill's song 'The Rebel Girl,' written for Flynn, and the phrase 'Bread and Roses,' though from a 1911 James Oppenheim poem, became permanently fused with the Lawrence struggle as labor's enduring slogan for dignity as well as subsistence.

In 1920 Flynn co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union alongside Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, and others. The ACLU grew directly out of the Workers' Defense Union (WDU), which Flynn had organized in 1918 to defend labor activists prosecuted under the Espionage Act during World War I. Through the 1920s, Flynn led the ACLU's campaign to save Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of murder in Massachusetts in a trial saturated with anti-immigrant and anti-radical bias. Flynn crisscrossed the country speaking, fundraising, and distributing literature to build public pressure. When the two men were executed in August 1927, the case stood as one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American legal history: for Flynn, a turning point that sharpened her understanding of the relationship between law and class power.

In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the ACLU board adopted a resolution equating Nazism with Communism and barring members of either from holding office in the organization. Flynn, the only open Communist on the board, was the resolution's unmistakable target. After a formal 'trial' within the ACLU, the board voted to expel her in 1940. That a woman who had spent her entire adult life fighting for free speech could be purged from the very organization she helped found, for the sole reason of her Communist Party membership, became a defining symbol of how anti-communism corroded civil libertarian principles within American liberalism even before the Cold War fully took hold. In 1976, the ACLU posthumously reversed its decision.

In June 1951, Flynn was arrested in the second wave of Smith Act prosecutions, alongside 16 other Communist Party members. Following the 1949 conviction of eleven top CPUSA leaders in the first 'Foley Square trial,' the Justice Department targeted a wider circle of Party officers across the country. During the nine-month trial, Flynn, together with co-defendant Pettis Perry, chose to act as her own attorney rather than retain counsel. Her summation to the jury on April 24, 1952, became a landmark in the history of American political trials: 'We are Communist leaders, proudly and avowedly. We will prove to you that we are not a criminal conspiracy but a 33-year-old working-class political party.' She walked the jury through her own life story and the history of the American labor movement, arguing that she had never advocated the violent overthrow of the government. The jury convicted her nonetheless, and the judge imposed a three-year sentence.

Flynn served 28 months at the Federal Prison Camp for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she observed and documented the lives of her fellow inmates. The result was The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (1963), a candid memoir that described racial segregation inside the prison, overcrowding, lesbian relationships, and monotonous labor, while also conveying the solidarity she built with other prisoners and her unshaken political convictions. Upon her release in 1957, Flynn immediately resumed political work.

In January 1961, Flynn was elected chair of the CPUSA National Committee, succeeding Eugene Dennis. She was the first woman ever to lead the American Communist Party. The following year, the State Department revoked her passport under the McCarran Act, and Flynn, together with Herbert Aptheker, filed suit. In June 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Aptheker v. Secretary of State that the passport revocation violated the Fifth Amendment's due process guarantee. Three months after her Supreme Court victory, Flynn died in Moscow at age 74 during a visit to the Soviet Union. From the Smith Act dock to the Supreme Court bench: Flynn's final years traced the arc of a radical who refused to surrender her political convictions through the deepest freeze of the Cold War.