“Mother” Jones was an American labor organizer, union activist, and teacher who became a legend in her own time. She was born Mary Harris in Cork, Ireland (though more likely in 1837 than on May Day 1830 as commonly celebrated). After the devastation of the potato famine, her father immigrated to North America and later sent for his family to join him. Mary arrived in Toronto, when she was in her mid-teens, learned dressmaking, and worked as a teacher in Michigan and Tennessee.

While living in Memphis, Mary met and married George Jones, an iron molder and active member of the International Iron Molders Union. The couple had four children. In 1867, a tragic yellow fever epidemic claimed the lives of Mary’s husband and all of her children, after which Mary moved to Chicago at age thirty to start a new life as a dressmaker. There, another disaster struck when the 1871 Great Chicago Fire destroyed her shop and all her possessions.

Mary later claimed that it was after the fire that she turned to labor activism. By the mid- 1880s, when she was in her late forties, she joined the Knights of Labor and in the 1890s agitated for the newly formed United Mine Workers (UMW).

She dedicated her life to organizing American workers (mostly coal workers) into unions and to offering support during strikes, including organizing the strikers’ wives into “mop and broom brigades” to drive out scabs. She was a spellbinding public speaker and worked hard to educate the public about the appalling conditions of American workers. In 1903, Mother Jones famously led an interstate march of under-sixteen-year-old striking textile workers in order to force public’s attention to the problem of child labor. She lived among the people with whom she worked, and said that her home was “Well, wherever there is a fight.”

As a UMW activist, she rose to fame as “Mother Jones,” the self-proclaimed “hell-raiser,” denounced in the Senate as “the most dangerous woman in America” and “the grandmother of all agitators.” This led Mother Jones to retort, “I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators.”

Mother Jones worked as a lecturer for the Socialist Party from 1904 to 1912 before returning to the UMW. In 1905, she participated in the founding of the International Workers of the World but subsequently remained aloof from the organization. In 1913, she was arrested while leading a protest march in West Virginia, convicted by a military court on trumped-up charges of murder, and sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment. The trial itself highlighted the terrible conditions in West Virginia’s mines and led to a Senate inquiry in the matter as well as Mother Jones’ release. The same year, she was arrested twice during a yearlong strike of mine workers in Colorado.

Mother Jones left the UMW in 1922, but continued to make public appearances as a speaker on labor issues into her nineties.

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”