Grave of Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre is buried in the former German Waldheim section of Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, three grave plots to the right of the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument. The stone is small and plain, inscribed with her name and dates. It sits in the cluster of radical burials that made this cemetery a pilgrimage destination for the American left across more than a century, in the company of Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, and the executed Haymarket martyrs themselves.
De Cleyre was born in Leslie, Michigan, in 1866 and spent the most active years of her life in Philadelphia, where she taught English to immigrant Jewish workers and wrote prolifically on anarchism, feminism, free thought, and direct action. She came to anarchism through the Haymarket executions of 1887, a conversion she later described as one of her deepest shames and turning points. Over the following two decades she lectured widely, survived an assassination attempt by a former student in 1902, and developed the position she called “anarchism without adjectives” — a refusal to bind the stateless future to any single economic doctrine. Her 1912 essay “Direct Action” argued that ordinary people had always moved history through autonomous collective force, independent of electoral and legislative channels. Emma Goldman called her “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.”
She died in Chicago on June 20, 1912, of septic meningitis, and was buried three days later at Waldheim as roughly two thousand mourners gathered, including Lucy Parsons, who placed red carnations on the casket. Her grave draws visitors year-round alongside the Haymarket Monument and the other radical plots in this section of the cemetery. The cemetery is accessible by car or by the CTA Blue Line to the Forest Park terminus, then a short walk south on Des Plaines Avenue.
Plot Section N
Memorial ID 8795
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