Civil rights & activism / Literature
Agnes Inglis
1870–1952 · anarchist activist and archivist
Detroit-born heiress turned anarchist who funded radical causes and built the Labadie Collection, one of the great archives of American radicalism.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Died
- Birth name
- Agnes Ann Inglis
- Detroit years
- 1870–1920s
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Agnes Inglis was born into a wealthy Detroit family in 1870, lost her father at four and grew up in a strict religious household she later described as deeply harmful. Social work changed her: she worked first at the Franklin Street Settlement House in Detroit, among the city's immigrant poor, and then at Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago. In 1912 a pamphlet by Emma Goldman drew her into the anarchist movement. She used her inheritance to pay strike funds and bail for arrested activists, raised money for the defense of figures such as Sacco and Vanzetti and Bill Haywood, organized anarchist lectures around southeast Michigan and spoke with Rudolf Rocker at events of the Detroit Modern School. Through her friendship with the Detroit anarchist Jo Labadie she discovered the unorganized mass of radical literature he had given to the University of Michigan library. From the 1920s she devoted her life to cataloguing and expanding it, turning the Labadie Collection into a major research archive. She died in 1952.
Highlights
- Worked at Detroit's Franklin Street Settlement House
- Joined the anarchist movement after reading Emma Goldman in 1912
- Spoke at events of the Detroit Modern School
- Built the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan