Emma Goldman

Born June 27, 1869 Kaunas City, Lithuania

Died May 14, 1940 Toronto, Canada

Buried Forest Home Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois*

*Her gravestone inaccurately lists her day of birth as June 29 and inaccurately lists her date of death as May 14, 1939.

Emma Goldman was a tireless champion for free speech, women’s equality, and the rights of workers to unionize.  She founded the Mother Earth magazine where she advocated for those and other causes.  During World War I Goldman railed against the draft which led to her arrest and a two-year prison sentence.  After she served her sentence, she was deported and lived the rest of her life in Toronto, Canada. 

The event that stirred her, seemingly more than any other, was the Haymarket affair of 1886.  During a union strike at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago, a crowd had gathered with workers and police clashing when a bomb was thrown—officers and workers were killed in the incident.  A funerary monument to commemorate the incident was commissioned and unveiled in 1893.  Goldman’s wish was to buried next to that monument in the Forest Home Cemetery.

Goldman’s monument is a tall ornamented unpolished gray granite gravestone with a bronze bas-relief of her portrait by American-born sculptor Jo Davidson (March 30, 1883 – January 2, 1952).  Her monument reads: “Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty“.