The International Working People's Association (IWPA), sometimes known as the "Black International," and originally named the "International Revolutionary Socialists", was an international anarchist political organization established in 1881 at a convention held in London, England.

Albert Richard Parsons was a pioneering American socialist and later anarchist newspaper editor, orator, and labor activist. As a teenager, he served in the military force of the Confederate States of America in Texas, during the American Civil War. After the war, he settled in Texas, and became an activist for the rights of former slaves, and later a Republican official during Reconstruction. With his wife Lucy Parsons, he then moved to Chicago in 1873 and worked in newspapers. There he became interested in the rights of workers. In 1884, he began editing The Alarm newspaper. Parsons was one of four Chicago radical leaders controversially convicted of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb attack on police remembered as the Haymarket affair.