Johnnie Tillmon

Tillmon was born into a family of sharecroppers on April 10, 1926. When she was five years old, her mother died during childbirth and in 1944, she went to live with her aunt.{{cite web|date=|title=American National Biography Online: Tillmon, Johnnie|url=http://anb.org/articles/15/15-01372.html|publisher=Anb.org|accessdate=2015-11-10}} Tillmon never finished high school.

She left to marry James Tillmon in 1948, but they divorced in 1952. In 1959 she moved to California to join her brothers. By that time she was a single mother to six children.{{cite web|url=http://symposia.library.csulb.edu/iii/cpro/DigitalItemViewPage.external;jsessionid=E9AD176910B4FDBCF026CEC0AD5E898E?lang=&sp=1001808&sp=T&sp=1&suite=def |title=Content Pro IRX |publisher=Symposia.library.csulb.edu |date= |accessdate=2015-11-10}}

In California she found work as a union shop steward in a Compton laundry. In 1963, she became ill, causing her to miss work. She then began to worry about her children growing up without proper supervision as a result of her job.

After seeking public assistance, Tillmon became subject to harassment by welfare officials, including invasive "midnight raids," wherein officials would inspect residences looking for evidence of a hidden windfall, proof of a man in residence, or evidence of secret profits. Seeing how people on welfare were treated, she organized mothers and welfare recipients in the Nickerson Garden housing project where she lived through the Nickerson Gardens Planning Organization.

Within months, she and her friends had founded Aid to Needy Children-Mothers Anonymous, one of the first grassroots welfare mothers' organizations. ANC Mothers Anonymous later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization. George Wiley, a chemist and civil rights activist, became the latter's first executive director while Tillmon served as its first chairman.{{cite book|author=Dorothy Sue Cobble|author-link=Dorothy Sue Cobble|title=The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=fxUIjT_b7IkC&pg=PA205|date=15 March 2007|publisher=Cornell University Press|isbn=978-0-8014-8943-3|pages=205–}} At its peak in the late 1960s, the organization had nearly 25,000 dues-paying members.{{cite web |url=https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/09/730684320/the-mothers-who-fought-to-radically-reimagine-welfare |title=The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare |last=Demby |first=Gene |date=9 June 2019 |publisher=NPR |access-date=26 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220126085032/https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/06/09/730684320/the-mothers-who-fought-to-radically-reimagine-welfare |archive-date=26 January 2022 }}

In 1972, Wiley resigned and Tillmon moved to Washington to become the organization's executive director. Though the organization was financially strained at that point, the role was a paying position which allowed her to go off welfare.{{cite web |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-07-09-ls-21958-story.html |title=THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Dreamer and Her Dream Lose Ground |last=Mitchell |first=John L. |date=9 July 1995 |work=Los Angeles Times |access-date=26 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220126083851/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-07-09-ls-21958-story.html |archive-date=26 January 2022 }} She served in this role until 1974, when the organization shut down due to lack of funds. She then returned to California where she worked as a legislative aid and served on welfare committees at both the state and local levels.

While Wiley and his advisers tried to mobilize the working poor, especially white blue-collar workers, into the welfare rights movement, welfare mothers, led by Tillmon, sought to align with a women's movement and gain support from feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW). Tillmon herself attempted to broaden the horizons of the feminist movement by redefining poverty as a "women's issue," delivering speeches to mostly-female audiences in which she frequently compared the bureaucracy of welfare to a sexist marriage.

Whereas the mainstream women's liberation movement was made up of younger, middle-class white women organizing around their right to join the workforce, the women of the welfare rights movement—consisting mostly of black women with organizers in Puerto Rican neighborhoods and on Native American reservations—prioritized motherhood and making welfare a guaranteed right. At the time welfare programs could cancel or alter benefits if the recipients had more children or if a male partner moved in, and some welfare mothers were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from having more children.{{cite web |url=https://abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/sterilizing-sick-poor-cut-welfare-costs-north-carolinas/story?id=14093458 |title=Sterilizing the Sick, Poor to Cut Welfare Costs: North Carolina's History of Eugenics |last=Hutchison |first=Courtney |date=17 July 2011 |website=ABC News |access-date=26 January 2022}}

In her landmark 1972 essay, "Welfare Is a Woman's Issue{{cite journal |last1=Tillmon |first1=Johnnie |date=Spring 1972 |title=Welfare Is a Women's Issue |url=https://msmagazine.com/2021/03/25/welfare-is-a-womens-issue-ms-magazine-spring-1972/ |journal=Ms. |issue=1 |access-date=26 January 2022}}," which was published in Ms., she emphasized women's right to adequate income, regardless of whether they worked in a factory or at home raising children.{{cite web |url=https://msmagazine.com/2021/03/25/welfare-is-a-womens-issue-ms-magazine-spring-1972/ |title=From the Vault: "Welfare is a Women's Issue" (Spring 1972) |last=Tillmon |first=Johnnie |website=msmagazine.com |date=25 March 2021 | access-date=26 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220126060506/https://msmagazine.com/2021/03/25/welfare-is-a-womens-issue-ms-magazine-spring-1972/ |archive-date=26 January 2022 }}

Tillmon married her second husband, Harvey Blackston, a blues harmonica player known as Harmonica Fats, in 1979. They lived together in Watts, in a house only a few blocks from Nickerson Gardens.

Tillmon died at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles on November 22, 1995, at the age of 69. Her cause of death was diabetes.{{cite web |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/27/us/johnnie-tillmon-blackston-welfare-reformer-dies-at-69.html |title=Johnnie Tillmon Blackston, Welfare Reformer, Dies at 69 |date=27 November 1995 |work=New York Times |access-date=26 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220126070733/https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/27/us/johnnie-tillmon-blackston-welfare-reformer-dies-at-69.html |archive-date=26 January 2022 }}{{cite web |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-me-7043-story.html |title=Welfare Rights Pioneer Tillmon-Blackston Dies : Activism: In the 1960s, a single mother in a Watts housing project helped form a group that sought better treatment and services for the poor. |last=Goldman |first=Abigail |date=25 November 1995 |work=Los Angeles Times |access-date=26 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220126074006/https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-11-25-me-7043-story.html |archive-date=26 January 2022 }} Tillmon had used a wheelchair after the amputation of her left foot and was on dialysis for four years prior to her death.

In 1996, Harmonica Fats released the album Blow, Fat Daddy, Blow! as a collaboration with Bernie Pearl. The album was dedicated to the memory of Tillmon.{{cite web |url=https://music.apple.com/us/artist/harmonica-fats/285198780 |title=About Harmonica Fats |publisher=Apple Music}}

The National Union of the Homeless used what was called a "Johnnie Tillmon model" of organizing, named after her.{{cite book|last=Baptist|first=Willie|title=Pedagogy of the Poor|year=2011|publisher=Teachers College Press|location=New York|author2=Jan Rehman}}

• "[https://msmagazine.com/2021/03/25/welfare-is-a-womens-issue-ms-magazine-spring-1972/ Welfare is a Women's Issue]" (1972), published in Ms., by Johnnie Tillmon
• "Want to Start A Revolution? Radical Women In The Black Freedom Struggle" (2009), edited by Dayo Gore, Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard. Note: "Feminist Review" stated about this anthology: "These women stood at the intersection of racial, sexual, and class oppression, and often devoted themselves to working on all three fronts. A chapter on Johnnie Tillmon and the welfare rights movement explores this theme of poor Black women's triple exploitation..."{{cite web|url=http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2010/03/want-to-start-revolution-radical-women.html |title=Review: Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle |author=Charlotte Malerich |publisher=feministreview.blogspot.com |date=29 March 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110708035916/http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2010/03/want-to-start-revolution-radical-women.html |archive-date=8 July 2011 }}
• "[https://csulb-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.3/206717 Welfare Mothers, Welfare Rights]", a five-part oral history interview with Johnnie Tillmon conducted by Sherna Berger Gluck in 1991. From The Sixties: Los Angeles Area Social Movements/Activists collection at California State University, Long Beach.{{Cite web |title=Welfare Mothers, Welfare Rights |url=https://csulb-dspace.calstate.edu/handle/10211.3/206717 |access-date=2022-10-15 |website=csulb-dspace.calstate.edu}}

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Category:1926 births

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