Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a prominent labor organizer and political activist in the early 20th century, known for her influential role in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and her dedication to various social causes. Born into a politically engaged family in the Bronx, Flynn became a traveling union organizer, leading significant strikes across the United States, including those in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. She became involved in free speech conflicts and advocated for the rights of marginalized groups, notably supporting the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti and organizing the Workers Defense Union during the Red Scare.
In 1938, she joined the Communist Party, where she became an outspoken speaker and writer, contributing regularly to the Daily Worker. Flynn faced legal challenges under the Smith Act and served a prison sentence, during which she authored her autobiography. After her release, she continued to lead within the Communist Party, becoming the first female national chair. Flynn's legacy is marked by her commitment to labor rights, civil rights, and her activism spanning several decades until her death in 1964 while visiting the Soviet Union, where she received a state funeral. Her contributions to social justice and labor movements have been preserved through her writings and archived papers.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Labor Leader
- Born: August 7, 1890
- Birthplace: Concord, New Hampshire
- Died: September 5, 1964
- Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)
Biography
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the daughter of Thomas Flynn, quarry worker and civil engineer, and Annie Gurley, a tailor. Both parents were political activists and sympathizers with Irish rebels. In 1900 they moved to the Bronx, where the Flynn home became a meeting place for socialists and Irish freedom fighters. In 1906 Flynn joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and became a “jawsmith,” or traveling union organizer. She organized major strikes in Minersville, Pennsylvania, in 1911; Lawrence, Lowell, and New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1912; Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913-14; and Passaic, New Jersey, 1926. In 1908 she married Jack Archibald Jones but later left him and returned home with her child. From 1908 to 1910 Flynn was involved in conflicts over free speech in Missoula, Montana, and Spokane, Washington. From 1919 to 1926 she worked to secure public support for the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, while in the meantime organizing the Workers Defense Union to aid victims of the Palmer Raids (attacks on radicals caused by the Red Scare following World War I). In 1926, worn out from her taxing work, she collapsed from physical exhaustion. This collapse may also have been brought on by the conclusion of an unhappy love affair with the anarchist organizer Carlo Tresca. She recuperated in Portland, Oregon, at the home of Dr. Marie Equi, a physician who performed abortions and who was IWW organizer.
After regaining her health in 1936, Flynn returned to New York and took up her work for unions. In 1938 she joined the Communist Party. Flynn was one of the organizers of the ACLU, but she was later ousted by the ACLU in 1940 because of her membership in the Communist party; she was reinstated posthumously in 1976. She was a popular speaker for the party, and she wrote two to four times a week for the Daily Worker for over twenty-six years. She was not interested in party politics and preferred work as an organizer, devoting herself first to work with immigrant workers and in the late 1950’s and in the 1960’s to work with civil rights workers and student activists. Flynn was indicted with other members of the Communist Party leadership in 1951 under the Smith Act, which made it illegal to belong to any group that advocated the overthrow of the government. She defended herself eloquently during the trial but was sentenced to three years in the Alderson federal penitentiary in West Virginia. While waiting for her jail term to begin, she wrote her autobiography, I Speak My Own Piece (1955; later reprinted in 1973 as The Rebel Girl). After she was released from prison in 1957, she became the first female national chair of the Communist Party. She ran unsuccessfully for the New York State General Assembly and headed the Women’s Commission of the Communist Party. In 1963 she published her prison memoir as The Alderson Story (1963). She died on a visit to the Soviet Union in 1964 and received an elaborate state funeral. Obituaries appeared in The New York Times on September 6, 1964, and September 18, 1964. Flynn’s papers were collected in the Taniment Library at New York University.