Agnes Inglis

Agnes Ann Inglis (1870 - 1952) was an anarchist and librarian who became the main architect of the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan.

Life

Born to Scottish immigrants, her father was a doctor and her family was deeply religious and conservative. Her father died in 1874, and her mother died in 1899. She began to study history and literature at the University of Michigan under an allowance from wealth family members. But dropped out and became a social worker in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor. She became increasingly sympathetic to immigrant workers and became increasingly political.

She met and befriended Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, performing radical activities during World War I and provided money for legal support during the First Red Scare after World War I.

She befriended Joseph Labadie in 1924 and discovered materials he donated to the University of Michigan had hardly been cared for, kept in a locked cage. She began to work on the collection, organizing and cataloguing it, and sent letters to anarchists across the country asking for information, collecting an enormour volume of publications and writings for her collection. Including the papers of Roger Baldwin, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Ralph Chaplin. Her efforts increased the size of the collection twentyfold, and she died in 1952.