In the depression summer of 1893, Emma Goldman told a Union Square rally of the unemployed that a starving man had a right to demand bread — and if denied, to take it. New York charged her with "inciting to riot" for a riot that never occurred; a detective's disputed rendering of her words was the chief evidence, and she was sentenced to a year on Blackwell's Island. She was twenty-four, and the trial made her the most famous anarchist in America.
Goldman used the penitentiary as she would use every institution — studying nursing in the prison hospital, an experience that gave her a profession and deepened her radicalism. The 1893 case opened a quarter-century of legal siege: repeated arrests for lectures on free speech and birth control, two weeks' imprisonment in 1916 for distributing contraception information, two years in Missouri State Penitentiary for organizing against the World War I draft, and finally deportation in 1919 — the state never finding a charge that silenced her, only a boat.