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Johnnie Tillmon Blackston (born Johnnie Lee Percy; April 10, 1926 – November 22, 1995) was an American welfare rights activist. She is regarded as one of the most influential welfare rights activists in the country, whose work with the National Welfare Rights Organization influenced the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in particular.
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.
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. At its peak in the late 1960s, the organization had nearly 25,000 dues-paying members.
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. 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.
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.
In her landmark 1972 essay, "Welfare Is a Woman's Issue," 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.
Tillmon died at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles on November 22, 1995, at the age of 69. Her cause of death was diabetes. 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.
The National Union of the Homeless used what was called a "Johnnie Tillmon model" of organizing, named after her.
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