On a visit to Chicago in 1988, Uruguayan journalist and historian Eduardo Galeano asked local friends to take him to Haymarket Square, the place forever associated with, as he put it, “the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st.” He was quickly disappointed by what he found. “No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago,” Galeano lamented a few years later. “Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.”

In Uruguay, as around the globe, the Chicago anarchists executed in the 1880s while fighting for the eight-hour day have long been considered labor martyrs. But as Galeano’s fruitless search for a memorial demonstrates, in the United States — particularly in Chicago — the memory of the Haymarket martyrs has traditionally been suppressed, and the meaning of what happened to them has been contested for well over a century.

Reactionaries and those in power have typically presented the Haymarket affair as the quintessential story of “the thin blue line,” in which heroic police officers saved civilization from a lawless mob of terrorists. As recently as October 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot compared the current moment to the 1880s, when “people feared for their safety from groups of anarchists who routinely created chaos in the streets.”