Johnnie Tillmon

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.

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.

Tillmon married her second husband, Harvey Blackston, a blues harmonica player known as Harmonica Fats, in 1979. They lived together in Watts, in a house only a few blocks from Nickerson Gardens.

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.

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.

In California she found work as a union shop steward in a Compton laundry. In 1963, she became ill, causing her to miss work. She then began to worry about her children growing up without proper supervision as a result of her job. Instead of returning to work, she left her job and went on welfare.

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 (NWRO). George Wiley, a chemist and civil rights activist, became NWRO'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.

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.

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 NWRO influenced the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in particular.

Tillmon was born into a family of sharecroppers on April 10, 1926. When she was five years old, her mother died during childbirth and in 1944, she went to live with her aunt. Tillmon never finished high school.