Above is the only known video of Mary Harris Jones. It was filmed in 1930 by a newspaper reporter in Maryland. | Who Was Mother Jones? Mother Jones was a crusader for workers’ rights, and a voice for organized American labor. She saw the danger coal miners and steel workers faced every day, and was infuriated that for all their risk, they still lived in poverty while the coal and steel companies profited. A fearless woman, she once called herself a “hell-raiser” not a “humanitarian”.
Born Mary Harris on August 1, 1937 in Cork, Ireland during a time which the British ruled the land with an iron fist. Her grandfather is said to have been hanged by the British for being a freedom fighter, and her father is said to have fled Ireland with his family to avoid the same fate. Mary grew-up in Toronto and later worked as a tutor, teacher, and dressmaker in various cities throughout the United States before meeting her husband, a member of the Iron Molders’ Union, George E. Jones. Mary learned about the struggles of the worker as she traveled around with her husband. They had four children together, but by 1867 Mary was left alone when the yellow fever took her husband and all four children. She returned to her profession as a dressmaker in Chicago, but could not stand to see the wealth of the families she worked for in comparison to the poor workers. She said “Often while sewing for lords and barons who lived in magnificent houses on the Lake Shore Drive, I would look out of the plate glass windows and see the poor, shivering wretches, jobless and hungry, walking alongside the frozen lake front.... The contrast of their condition with that of the tropical comfort of the people for whom I sewed was painful to me. My employers seemed neither to notice nor to care." From then on Mary became a voice for social justice, quitting her job and traveling the country assisting and organizing labor strikes and unions. She became affectionately known as “mother” to the workers. Read her full autobiography at http://www.angelfire.com/nj3/RonMBaseman/mojones.htm |