Johnnie Tillmon

Johnnie Tillmon was a welfare-rights activist who, in a 1972 article in Ms. magazine, asserted that “welfare is a woman’s issue.” She was the daughter of a migrant sharecropper and worked as a union shop steward in a Compton laundry. Tillmon was a leader and chairperson of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) before later becoming the executive director.