Mother Jones Museum, Project- Mother Jones Chicago Statue

[appalachiablue]

- Mother Jones in 1902. (b. 1837, Cork Ireland- d. 1930, Silver Spring, Md.).

Mother Jones Museum is the website of the Mother Jones Heritage Project, a 501-c-3 non-profit. We are guided by the philosophy & model of Mother Jones, whose base was in Chicago, but who went across the US to organize and fight for justice.

So while we have traditional museum exhibits, we take Mother Jones on the road, create ways for people to experience her continuing relevance and the weight of the past on the present. We are currently sponsoring a campaign to put her on a statue in Chicago. There is no statue of Mother Jones in the United States, the founding mother of the U.S. labor movement.

Our project originated in 2014, inspired by the Cork Spirit of Mother Jones Festival. This website originated in 2008, as a project to revive Mother Jones and the early history of the activist labor and immigrant movement. We are proud to work with partners across the U.S. and the globe.

When Mother Jones was mocked as the “grandmother of all agitators,” in the U.S. Senate, she replied that she would someday like to be called “the great-grandmother of all agitators.” Born Mary Harris in Cork Ireland in 1837, she was an immigrant refugee who lost her entire family in a pandemic, then lost everything in the Chicago Fire of 1871.

- Hear Mother Jones Speak (1 minute)
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She became a rebel for justice, and became known simply as "Mother Jones," the mother of the working class. An icon of labor history, she organized against child labor, for workers rights, and helped to shape a spirit of civil disobedience in the cause of justice. Mother Jones believed that a workers movement would replace “this moneyed civilization with a higher and grander civilization for the ages to come.” To learn more, including a short documentary about her, see :

- Who was Mother Jones?
https://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/
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- Mother Jones Bio/Wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Jones
Mary G. Harris Jones (1837- 1930), known as Mother Jones from 1897 onwards, was an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who became a prominent union organizer, community organizer, and activist. She helped coordinate major strikes and co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World.

After Jones' husband and 4 children all died of yellow fever in 1867, and her dress shop was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, she became an organizer for the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers union. In 1902, she was called "the most dangerous woman in America" for her success in organizing mine workers and their families against the mine owners. In 1903, to protest the lax enforcement of the child labor laws in the Pennsylvania mines and silk mills, she organized a children's march from Philadelphia to the home of President Theodore Roosevelt in New York...



- Why A Mother Jones Chicago Statue -

​The government of Ireland seeded this project with $36,000 grant. We need to raise a total of $200,000. Please give generously. We have applied for locations on Wacker, near Michigan, but have not officially been granted a permit. We have support from Alderman Brendan Reilly for this project.

Imagine, "Let's meet at the Mother Jones statue!"

There are hardly any sculptures of women historical figures in the city of Chicago. Let's put this iconic Irish immigrant refugee and founder of the American labor movement--the Mother of the working class--on a statue in the city she called home.

More, https://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/statue



- United States Department of Labor poster, 2010.

[Dale in Laurel MD]

1. There's a Mother Jones Elementary School not far from me.

It got named after her since she died at a farm that then existed nearby.

[appalachiablue]

2. More people should know this, same for Clara

Barton, the American nurse who lived in Marlyand during her last years.