Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie (April 18, 1850 – October 7, 1933) was an American labor organizer, anarchist, Greenbacker,[1] libertarian socialist,[2] social activist, printer, publisher, essayist, and poet.

His boyhood was a frontier existence among Potawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and Native Americans.

Without the oppression of the state, Labadie believed, humans would choose to harmonize with "the great natural laws...without robbing [their] fellows through interest, profit, rent and taxes."

Although Labadie did not support the militant anarchism of the Haymarket anarchists, he fought for the clemency of the accused because he did not believe they were the sole perpetrators of violence.

A month later the Detroit Water Board, where Labadie worked as a clerk, dismissed him from his post for expressing anarchist sentiments.

In about 1910, when he was 60 years old, Labadie began to prepare for the preservation of the vast collection of pamphlets, newspapers, and correspondence which he had accumulated in the attic of his home.

He donated the vast majority of manuscripts and ephemera acquired in his lifetime to the collection at the University of Michigan Library, a deed he viewed as his primary legacy.