The fact that Jim Larkin insisted throughout his life that he had been born in 1876 in Ireland makes it a little strange to write a tribute on his 150th anniversary. In fact, his iconic gravestone in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery carries that date, as did the first thorough biography of his life, written by his namesake, the late Irish American historian Emmet Larkin. But the discovery of a birth certificate by another historian, Desmond Greaves, established with some certainty that James “Jim” Larkin had been born on January 28, 1874, at 41 Combermere Street, a son of Toxteth in Liverpool.

Both of the labor leader’s parents hailed from Ulster; his father, also James Larkin, from County Armagh and his mother, Mary Ann McNulty, from County Down. At the time he was born, Liverpool was riven by sectarian division, and Toxteth, an Irish Catholic slum surrounded by a larger Irish Protestant slum, more so than most. The trade unionist Fred Bower, Larkin’s friend and comrade in later life, would remember the young Jim as a leader of the Catholic schoolboy gangs who would fight with the Protestant ones from Bower’s own area. In the course of the brawls, Bower recalled, Larkin gave him “two marks I will carry to the grave.” Many years later, in a court room in New York, Jim Larkin would give his own account of his youth:

I told you in my own statement the amount of schooling I got. I went to school for three-and-a-quarter years. It was a poverty-stricken school, and I was taught the truth of eternal justice. I was taught the brotherhood of man was a true and living thing, and the fear of God was a thing that ought to cover all my days and also control my actions.

And then I had occasion to go out into the world and found out there was no fatherhood of God, and there was no brotherhood of man, but everyman in society was compelled to be life a wolf or a hyena, trying to tear down the other man that he might gain an advantage either by the other man’s suffering or the other man’s sorrow.