Mothering as Resistance: The Legacy of Johnnie Tillmon
Collage of Johnnie Tillmon. Collage by Jaimee A. Swift.
By Karla Méndez
From her roots as the daughter of sharecroppers to her leadership in the welfare rights movement, Johnnie Tillmon redefined feminism through the lens of Black motherhood, economic justice, and political resistance.
“I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.”
Johnnie Tillmon’s journey from a Black single mother on welfare to national leader and executive director of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) is one of the most powerful yet overlooked stories in American activism. Illness led her to apply for welfare in 1963 but rather than accept her circumstances, Tillmon channeled her lived experience of poverty, surveillance, and bureaucratic indignity into a radical organizing effort. She founded Aid to Needy Children–Mothers Anonymous (ANC–Mothers Anonymous), which later became part of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).
Under her leadership, NWRO didn’t merely demand policy tweaks, it fundamentally reshaped the definitions of feminism and civil rights. Through sit-ins, Senate testimonies, and the publication of her landmark essay “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue” in Ms. magazine in 1972, Tillmon articulated welfare not as charity but as an unavoidable structural necessity rooted in caregiving and survival. Her advocacy gave voice to the experiences of poor Black women, who were commonly dismissed or ignored. She pushed back against both a benevolent state and a mainstream feminist movement that centered middle-class employment as their goal. In doing so, she illuminated how race, gender, and class are inseparable in struggles for justice, offering a powerful blueprint for activism that remains urgent today.
Born Into Labor
Johnnie Lee Percy was born on April 10, 1926, in Scott, Arkansas, into a family of sharecroppers who symbolized the post–Civil War farming system that sustained entrenched racial and economic hierarchies. Landowners provided tools, seed, and housing in exchange for a share of the harvest, often charging exorbitant prices at the "company store" and interpreting crop yields to leave tenants perpetually owing. This kept Black families in Arkansas and across the South locked into cycles of debt and dependency. As the eldest of three children born to a widowed sharecropping father (her mother passed away when she was five), Tillmon began working in the cotton fields around age seven, learning to pick cotton and perform housework alongside chores like churning milk, labor that taught her firsthand about exploitation, resilience, and scarcity.
“Johnnie Tillmon’s journey from a Black single mother on welfare to national leader and executive director of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) is one of the most powerful yet overlooked stories in American activism.”
This upbringing, set against the backdrop of Southern sharecropping's brutal economic realities, shaped Tillmon’s consciousness early on. She attended high school in Little Rock after moving in with an aunt but by the end of World War II she had left school and was working nights in a munitions plant and then worked in a laundry, both of which became her first taste of labor organizing. These formative years rooted in generational poverty and labor exploitation deeply informed her later activism. When she faced corrective welfare bureaucracies in California, she drew on the memory of slavery’s legalism and sharecropping’s sting, channeling that early understanding into structural critique and collective resistance.
From Welfare Recipient to Organizer
Image with quote by Johnnie Tillmon from “Welfare as a Women’s Issue” (1972).
When Tillmon arrived in Los Angeles in 1959 with her six children, she was diagnosed with an illness that turned her upside down. Suffering from a debilitating condition that forced her to leave her physically taxing job in a Compton laundry, she reluctantly applied for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). But what was supposed to be a support system instead became a hostile environment. As a Black mother, she found welfare to be a site of relentless surveillance, including humiliating “midnight raids” in which case workers searched homes for evidence of male partners, pried into personal affairs, monitored refrigerators, televisions, and questioned how recipients spent their money. Tillmon observed that this invasive scrutiny wasn’t just administrative, it was deeply sexist and racialized, treating poor Black women as disposable and unworthy unless they proved their morality. It also worked to eliminate any kind of autonomy they may have had.
But resistance began in the very place where welfare’s dehumanization was most intense. In the Watts’ neighborhood of Los Angeles, Nickerson Gardens, Tillmon rallied six other mothers and started sending anonymous invitations that brought over 300 women to the first ANC‑Mothers Anonymous meeting in 1963. These initial gatherings, held discreetly in living rooms and community halls, offered a space for mothers to share experiences, prepare to challenge caseworkers, and resist coercive tactics. As ANC‑MA solidified, they established a community office by August 1963 to support those cut off from benefits, organize seminars on navigating welfare policy, and even help secure medical and childcare information, precursors to a broader movement for dignity and rights.
From these roots, Tillmon’s activism quickly expanded. By 1966 ANC‑MA chapters were multiplying across southern California, linking with other grassroots welfare‑rights groups. And in 1967, 67 welfare rights organizations met in Washington, D.C., and the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was established with Tillmon as its first chairperson. Campaigns included the Walk for Decent Welfare, a 155-mile march from Cleveland, Ohio to the statehouse in Columbus and a “sleep-out” at a state office building in Philadelphia to compel legislators to approve a 30 percent increase in welfare payments. The NWRO was also responsible for the formation of the Women Infants & Children (WIC) food assistance program, and legally challenging and bringing an end to the “Man-in-the-House Rule” which allowed welfare agencies to eliminate a women-headed household’s welfare benefits if so much as a man’s garments was found in unannounced home inspections by caseworkers.
Chairwoman of the Unheard
As chairwoman and later executive director of the NWRO, Tillmon became a powerful national voice, taking the personal story of welfare dependency into high-profile forums. In 1968, NWRO members staged a sit-in during the Senate Finance Committee on Finance hearing to protest punishing welfare “work incentive” measures. Tilmon delivered moving pleadings that brought attention to the unseen labor of caregiving and the state’s crushing bureaucratic control over women’s lives. She was also invited, along with the organization, to testify before Congress. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the NWRO, providing an opportunity for its leaders to take part in the Poor People’s Campaign. This helped lead to a meeting between the NWRO and officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, boldly challenging a system that treated welfare as a privilege to be policed, not a human right .
“As chairwoman and later executive director of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Tillmon became a powerful national voice, taking the personal story of welfare dependency into high-profile forums.”
Tillmon’s public appearances extended beyond Capitol Hill. She used media outlets, speeches to women’s groups, and grassroots rallies to amplify her message, often repositioning welfare recipients not as passive clients but as organizers with demands. Tillmon’s most significant media moment came in 1972 when Ms. Magazine published her watershed essay, “Welfare Is a Woman’s Issue.” She argued that welfare was a necessity born of systemic injustice or what she called a “super-sexist marriage” with the state. Through this, she exposed how poor Black motherhood was burdened with policing and shame. By asserting that “surviving on welfare was a badge of honor,” Tillmon demanded that society recognize caregiving as legitimate labor and positioned welfare as a fundamental right rooted in economic justice.
Welfare, Womanhood, and the Right to Mother
Through this platform, she reached a national feminist audience, critiquing mainstream women’s liberation for sidelining poor Black mothers. She argued that while middle‑class feminists emphasized workforce participation while erasing the labor of motherhood. NWRO, which was led by mothers on welfare, prioritized caregiving and economic stability. They championed mothering on welfare as resistance and called for recognition, decent income, and dignity. They demanded a Guaranteed Adequate Income (GAI), which anticipated today’s universal basic income (UBI) dialogue, pushing for unconditional, needs-based financial support.
Johnnie Tillmon’s leadership in the NWRO represented a critical expansion of both the civil rights and feminist movements by embodying explicitly intersectional politics before the term was even coined. She and other welfare activists challenged mainstream frameworks that treated race, class, and gender as isolated issues. Instead, they built a multiracial, interclass coalition, rooted in the realities of poor Black mothers, and demanded economic rights tied to caregiving, not just to paid labor. This expanded the civil rights struggle from legal equality toward economic justice, pushing systemic poverty into the center of national discourse.
In contrast to mainstream women’s liberation, which focused on middle-class, white women’s right to escape traditional roles, Tillmon insisted on the value of mothers on welfare and the right not to take exploitative low-wage jobs. Her demand that “a job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income” disrupted simplistic feminist models of workforce inclusion by exposing how many jobs devalued care work and failed to provide real economic autonomy. In pushing welfare mothers into national policy debates, she anticipated intersectional feminist theory and practice, preceding Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 articulation of overlapping oppressions and movements like the Combahee River Collective that built on her legacy by centering Black women’s lived experiences.
“Building on Tillmon’s legacy of intersectional activism, her welfare-rights movement catalyzed a powerful shift in both civil rights and feminist spheres, one that reverberated well beyond its 1970s origins. While the NWRO grounded its demands in economic justice and dignity for poor Black mothers, it also laid structural foundations for later Black feminist practices.”
She Mothered a Movement
Today, Tillmon stands as a profound forerunner of intersectional activism and as a model for coalitional, care-centered justice struggles. Her fight for economic dignity, not charity, laid the groundwork for later movements: from reproductive justice campaigns to Black feminist, domestic worker, and care labor organizing. These 21st-century efforts continue to echo her call for policy that recognizes care work as labor, supports families across race and class, and challenges state structures rooted in poverty, sexism, and racism. Her legacy lives on in every movement that centers Black women as architects, not just beneficiaries, of social transformation.
Building on Tillmon’s legacy of intersectional activism, her welfare-rights movement catalyzed a powerful shift in both civil rights and feminist spheres, one that reverberated well beyond its 1970s origins. While the NWRO grounded its demands in economic justice and dignity for poor Black mothers, it also laid structural foundations for later Black feminist practices. The formation of groups like the Combahee River Collective in 1974 explicitly took up this mantle. As Barbara Smith and her peers declared, “race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression,” and their coalition of Black feminists carried forward Tillmon’s insistence on recognizing how care work and systemic inequality must be addressed together.
Though offshoots like the Combahee Collective and authors such as Smith and her sister Beverly expanded the theory of oppression through writings and community organizing, they never lost sight of the real-world labor that sparked those ideas. The anthology Home Girls (1983) and earlier works like All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave by Barbara Smith edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982), built on Tillmon’s framing of mothering while on welfare as labor and resistance . In demanding that economic policy respect caregiving as vital labor, Tillmon prefigured the language of identity politics and intersectionality that these later movements would formalize, assuring her place as a forerunner in 21st-century coalitional justice, reproductive-rights campaigns, and care-work advocacy.
Building on the rich foundations of Black feminist and welfare‑rights activism, Johnnie Tillmon’s work remains profoundly relevant in today’s conversations on universal basic income, reproductive justice, and Black maternal health. Modern UBI pilots, like the Magnolia Mother’s Trust and Stockton’s SEED program, echo Tillmon’s demand for unconditional economic support rooted in dignity for caregiving parents. Simultaneously, reproductive‑justice leaders such as Loretta Ross and organizations like Sister Song explicitly draw from welfare mothers’ fight for bodily autonomy and against coercive policies, a direct legacy of NWRO’s challenge to welfare‑linked fertility controls and forced sterilization. Moreover, the current focus on Black maternal health, facing crisis-level disparities in mortality and care, echoes Tillmon’s insistence that mothering itself is political labor deserving full economic recognition. Perhaps most importantly, Tillmon and her fellow welfare rights activists are no longer relegated to the footnotes of civil‑rights or feminist history, they are finally being celebrated as foundational architects of intersectional social change.
About the author: Karla Méndez is an arts and culture writer whose work examines the histories of Black and Latin American women and their representations within visual art, literature, poetry, and performance. She is interested in how women put forth representations of themselves that are accurately representative of their expansiveness and how they use these avenues to engage with topics of identity, gender, race, and the female body. Ultimately, her work seeks to explore and reinstate forgotten and ignored histories as a site of care for ourselves and our communities.
She is the lead columnist of Black Feminist Histories and Social Movements, a column for the advocacy organization Black Women Radicals. She is a contributor for the Boston Art Review and Elephant Magazine and her work has appeared in the Brown Art Review and Ampersand: An American Studies Journal.