Johnnie Tillmon (1926–1995)

Johnnie Tillmon was an important proponent of welfare rights in the last third of the twentieth century. Her organizing, activism, and advocacy efforts did much to help welfare recipients (especially women) receive their legal due while also helping to humanize them and their families in the public eye in the midst of efforts by conservatives to demonize them for their own political purposes.

Johnnie Lee Percy was born on April 10, 1926, in Scott (Pulaski and Lonoke counties). Her family were sharecroppers, and her mother died during childbirth when Johnnie was five. She then lived with an aunt for a while. In 1948, she married James Tillmon; they divorced in 1952.

In 1959, Tillmon moved to California with her six children. The family moved into a housing project, and Tillmon worked as a shop steward in a laundry in Compton. After she became ill and was unable to work in 1963, friends told her she should seek welfare. But it was something she very much wanted to avoid, having heard horrible things about the experience and being well aware of the stigma that accompanied those who participated in the government program. But desperate to provide for her children, Tillmon applied for and began to receive welfare. At the same time, she learned firsthand how the welfare system often worked, with harassment of recipients by caseworkers being a common occurrence. Unwilling to accept such treatment for a government-provided benefit to which she was legally entitled, Tillmon organized other welfare recipients and residents of her housing project, Nickerson Gardens, founding one of the nation’s first grassroots organizations for welfare mothers, ANC (Aid to Needy Children) Mothers Anonymous.

ANC Mothers Anonymous later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which was founded in 1967. Tillmon’s efforts represented the start of an activist career that she would continue to pursue until her death in 1995. She became one of the nation’s leading welfare rights advocates and activists, serving as the first chairperson of the NWRO.

The spring 1972 issue of Ms. Magazine included her article “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue.” In it, she argued that every woman had the right to an adequate income and the right to be treated with dignity, regardless of the kind of work she did, asserting, “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.”

In this same vein, Tillmon sought to align the NWRO with the emerging women’s movement, seeking support from the National Organization for Women (NOW). In an effort to broaden support for women and welfare recipients, she sought to define poverty as a women’s issue, saying that the bureaucracy of welfare was comparable to a sexist marriage.

The effort to make welfare more of a women’s issue added to some existing tensions in the NWRO, and in a leadership shake-up, Tillmon became the organization’s executive director in 1972. However, it was a challenging time for social reformers, and in 1974, financial troubles forced the closing of the NWRO’s Washington DC office. With the closure, Tillmon returned to California, where she remained active in efforts to secure welfare reform, working as a legislative aide as well as with state and local organizations.

Tillmon married Harvey Blackston, a blues harmonica player known as Harmonica Fats, in 1979. Tillmon suffered from diabetes and, in her later years, used a wheelchair after her left foot was amputated. She died on November 22, 1995, having been on dialysis for the last four years of her life.

For additional information:
Abdelfatah, Rund, and Ramtin Arablouei. “How One Woman Set out to Do Something about the Financial Burden of Motherhood.” NPR, June 27, 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461207/how-one-woman-set-out-to-do-something-about-the-financial-burden-of-motherhood (accessed November 20, 2024).

Tillmon, Johnnie. “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue.” Ms., Spring 1972. https://msmagazine.com/2021/03/25/welfare-is-a-womens-issue-ms-magazine-spring-1972/ (accessed November 20, 2024).

Tsuchiya, Kazuyo. “Johnnie Tillmon (1926–1995).” BlackPast, January 23, 2007. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/tillmon-johnnie-1926-1995/ (accessed November 20, 2024).

William H. Pruden III
Ravenscroft School