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Mary Harris ‘Mother" Jones, by Robert Shetterly, 2003.
flipFlip to 'Mother' Mary Harris Jones, circa 1910.
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Oil on canvas painting, head and shoulders of Mother Jones, inscription on painting reads: "Goodbye, boys; I'm under arrest. I may have to go to jail. I may not see you for a long time. Keep up the fight! Don't surrender! Pay no attention to the injunction machine at Parkersburg. The Federal judge is a scab anyhow. While you starve he plays golf. While you serve humanity, he serves injunctions for the money powers."

Credit: Courtesy of Robert Shetterly

Born in Cork, Ireland in the 1830s, Mary Harris Jones lost her husband and four children to a yellow fever epidemic in Tennessee in 1867, and then lost her home in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She spent the rest of her life fighting for worker's rights as an activist and labor organizer. Frequently imprisoned for subversive speech and inciting "riots," "Mother" Jones was once hailed by her critics as the "most dangerous woman in America." Learning that she had been denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate as "the grandmother of all agitators," she said, "I hope to live long enough to be the great-grandmother of all agitators."

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