From the Spring 1972 issue:
“Society needs women on welfare as ‘examples’ to let every woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man.”
Author: Johnnie Tillmon
Johnnie Tillmon was an American welfare rights activist born in Scott, Arkansas, in 1926. A migrant sharecropper’s daughter, she moved to California in 1959 and worked as a union shop steward in a Compton laundry.
Tillmon became ill in 1963 and was advised to seek welfare. She soon learned how welfare recipients were harassed by caseworkers. To fight this treatment, Tillmon organized people in the housing project and founded one of the first grassroots welfare mothers’ organizations called ANC (Aid to Needy Children) Mothers Anonymous, in 1963. ANC Mothers later became a part of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Tillmon quickly emerged as a leader and became a chairperson of the NWRO. Together with other welfare mothers, she struggled for adequate income, dignity, justice and democratic participation.
Even after she went off welfare, Tillmon remained a committed welfare rights activist until her death in 1995 at age 69. In 1979, she married the jazz musician Harvey Blackston and continued to live in Los Angeles where she headed the National Welfare Rights Organization on the local level. Her name now graces day care centers and housing developments—a small reminder of her lasting influence on “welfare as a women’s issue.”