Nancy Wohlforth was the first open LGBTQ person to be an officer of a major trade union in the United States. She was the first to serve on the AFL-CIO’s governing Executive Council, and the first to be an AFL-CIO vice-president. Nancy was also a founder and co-president of Pride at Work, the first national organization of LGBTQ union members. 

In an interview, Nancy said, “My consciousness as a labor person began when I was really young because my dad was in AFSCME in Wisconsin. He instilled in me a belief in unions being the only way working people get their rights and the need for unions among white-collar employees.” 

As a student at a Quaker high school in Providence, Nancy volunteered for the 1964 Freedom Summer to register Black voters in the South, at a time when civil rights activists there were being tortured and killed by Klansmen and local sheriffs. 

She was involved in the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University—“the best ten days of my life,” she told an interviewer.

As a VISTA volunteer in California, Nancy helped organize a massive rent strike in public housing to protest horrendous living conditions—and she was one of the Long Beach 21 who were arrested for protesting Governor Ronald Reagan’s cuts in children’s back-to-school clothing allowances. 

In 1983, Nancy ran for vice-president of Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 3 in San Francisco. At the time, she was a member of the local because of her day job as a pension analyst at the Carpenters’ union trust fund. But after hours, she was involved in a members’ caucus called A Growing Concern that focused on organizing, plus she was busy supporting 900 Local 3 members on strike against Blue Shield.

Three years later, Nancy was elected by Local 3 members as their senior business rep. Nancy raced around the Bay area managing about 150 contracts. She represented dolphin trainers and elephant caretakers at Marine World/Africa USA, an animal theme park in Vallejo. She represented photography curators and night janitors and everyone in between at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she represented faculty members of the San Francisco Art Institute.

In a city filled with nonprofits, she organized and then represented frontline workers at homeless shelters and detox centers such as Episcopal Community Services, Good Samaritan, and St. Vincent de Paul. 

Many of her members employed at homeless shelters had recently been homeless themselves. Several had steady incomes and benefits—and even owned their own homes--for the first time in their lives because of Nancy and Local 3.

The mainstay of Local 3’s membership was clerical workers in union trust funds, union-side law firms, and the union locals themselves.

Eventually, Nancy was elected international secretary-treasurer of OPEIU, and became one of the most popular leaders in the union’s history.

In 2005, Nancy was elected to the AFL-CIO Executive Council. There, Nancy spoke out for just about every progressive cause that came before the Council.

One was opposition to the Iraq war. Two years before she joined the Executive Council, Nancy had been a co-convenor of US Labor Against the War (USLAW). When it desperately needed a place to operate, she’d given it space in her Washington office. And along with her progressive colleagues on the Executive Council and USLAW itself, she used her influence to support a resolution at the 2005 AFL-CIO convention calling for rapid withdrawal of US troops from Iraq which passed with an overwhelming majority vote.

Never before had the AFL-CIO shown the courage to take such a stand, not even in the depths of the Vietnam war.

Nancy also became the strongest supporter of LGBTQ workers in the history of the Executive Council.

In her own local back in San Francisco, Nancy had battled over and over for domestic partner benefits and non-discrimination language for LGBTQ workers in her members’ contracts. She pressed the Executive Council to call on the California Supreme Court to strike down a restriction on same-sex marriage. She co-wrote an op-ed piece in the Detroit Free Press supporting benefits for domestic partners of Michigan state employees. She helped win the support of eleven national LGBTQ organizations for an increase in the national minimum wage. And she was a founding mother and co-president of Pride at Work, the AFL-CIO’s constituency group for LGBTQ union members.

Nancy also never compromised on the rights of transgender people. In 2007, when the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was before the House, Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi—two of the strongest advocates of queer rights in Congress—argued that it would have a better chance to pass if its protections were limited to gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers, and trans protections were dropped. Nancy would have none of it. The queer community would succeed or fail as one, and the AFL-CIO followed her lead.

In 2013, when the District of Columbia finally allowed it, Nancy married Denice Lombard. She and Denice continued their activism and organizing together until Nancy’s death on December 31, 2024. CLUW honors our sister, Nancy Wohlforth!

In Lasting Unity,

Sylvia J. Ramos
CLUW President

Clara Lemlich was born March 28, 1886, in the former Russian, now Ukrainian town of Gorodok, to a Jewish family. She immigrated to the United States with her family in 1903, following a pogrom in Kishinev. Lemlich was able to find a job in the garment industry upon her arrival in New York. Conditions there had become even worse since the turn of the century, as the new industrial sewing machine allowed employers to demand twice as much production from their employees, who often had to supply their own machines and carry them to and from work. Lemlich, along with many of her co-workers, rebelled against the long hours, low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement, and humiliating treatment from supervisors. Lemlich became involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) and was elected to the executive board of Local 25 of the ILGWU.

Lemlich quickly made a name for herself among her fellow workers, leading several strikes of shirtwaist makers and challenging the mostly male leadership of the union to organize women garment workers. She combined boldness with a good deal of charm (she was known for her fine singing voice) and personal bravery (she returned to the picket line in 1909 after having several ribs broken when gangsters hired by the employers attacked the picketers).

On November 22, 1909, to rally support for the striking shirtwaist workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and Leiserson Company, approximately 20,000 out of the 32,000 workers in the shirtwaist trade walked out in the next two days: the Uprising of the 20,000.

Lemlich took a leading role in bringing workers out, speaking at rallies until she lost her voice. The strike lasted until February 10, 1910, producing union contracts at almost every shop, but not at Triangle Shirtwaist, which became a synonym for "sweatshop" during the following year when on March 25, 1911, nearly 150 garment workers died as a result of a fire that consumed the factory.

Blacklisted from the industry and at odds with the conservative leadership of the ILGWU, Lemlich devoted herself to the campaign for women's suffrage. She founded the Wage Earner’s Suffrage League, a working class alternative to middle class suffrage organizations.

Lemlich married Joe Shavelson in 1913. The couple had three children and for the next thirty years she devoted herself to raising a family and organizing housewives. Jewish housewives in New York had boycotted kosher butchers to protest high prices in the first decade of the twentieth century and the Brooklyn Tenants Union led rent strikes and fought evictions. Lemlich and Kate Gitlow, mother of Benjamin Gitlow, attempted to organize a union of housewives that would address not only consumers' issues, but housing and education as well. The United Council of Working Class Housewives also raised money and organized relief for strikers in Passaic, New Jersey during the bitter 1926 strike.

In 1929, Lemlich launched the United Council of Working-Class Women (UCWW), which eventually had nearly fifty branches in New York City, as well as affiliates in Philadelphia, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Detroit. UCWW led a widespread boycott of butcher shops to protest high meat prices in 1935, using the militant tactics of flying squadrons of picketers that shut down more than 4,000 butcher shops in New York City. The strike became nationwide and the UCWW won support outside the Jewish and African-American communities to which it had been limited in New York.

Lemlich was active in the Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, which raised funds for Magen David Adom, protested nuclear weapons, campaigned for ratification of the United Nations' Convention on Genocide, opposed the War in Vietnam, and forged alliances with Sojourners for Truth, an African-American women's civil rights organization.

Lemlich was also active in Unemployed Councils activities and in founding the Emma Lazarus Council, which supported tenant rights. The Emma Lazarus Council declared in 1931 that no one would be evicted in Brighton Beach for inability to pay rent, then backed that up by rallying supporters to prevent evictions and returning tenants' furniture to their apartments in those cases in which authorities attempted to effect eviction.

Lemlich remained an unwavering member of the Communist Party, denouncing the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs. Her passport was revoked after a trip to the Soviet Union in 1951. She retired from garment work in 1954, then fought a long battle with the ILGWU to obtain a pension. In 1960, she married Abe Goldman, an old labor movement acquaintance. After Goldman's death in 1967, she moved to California to be near her children and in-laws. At age 81, she entered the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles. As a resident, she persuaded the management to join in the United Farm Workers boycotts of grapes and lettuce and helped the orderlies there to organize a labor union. A fighter until the end, CLUW honors Clara Lemlich!

In Lasting Unity,

Fannie Lou Townsend Hamer rose from humble beginnings in the Mississippi Delta to become one of the most important, passionate, and powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements and a leader in the efforts for greater economic opportunities for African Americans.

Hamer was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the 20th and last child of sharecroppers Lou Ella and James Townsend. She grew up in poverty, and at age six Hamer joined her family picking cotton. By age 12, she left school to work. In 1944, she married Perry Hamer and the couple toiled on the Mississippi plantation owned by W.D. Marlow until 1962. Because Hamer was the only worker who could read and write, she also served as plantation timekeeper.

Hamer and her husband wanted very much to start a family, but in 1961, a white doctor subjected Hamer to a hysterectomy without her consent while she was undergoing surgery to remove a uterine tumor. Forced sterilization was a common method of population control in Mississippi that targeted poor, African-American women. Members of the Black community called the procedure a "Mississippi appendectomy." The Hamers later raised two girls they adopted, eventually adopting two more. One, Dorothy Jean, died at age 22 of internal hemorrhaging after she was denied admission to the local hospital because of her mother's activism.

On June 9, 1963, Hamer was returning from a voter registration workshop by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Charleston, South Carolina. Traveling by bus with co-activists, they stopped for a break in Winona, Mississippi. Some of the activists went inside a local cafe, but were refused service by the waitress. Shortly after, a Mississippi State highway patrolman took out his billy club and intimidated the activists into leaving. One of the group decided to take down the officer's license plate number. While doing so, the patrolman and a police chief entered the café and arrested the party. Hamer left the bus and inquired if they could continue their journey back to Greenwood, Mississippi. At that point, the officers arrested her as well.

Once in county jail, Hamer's colleagues were beaten by the police in the booking room (including 15-year-old June Johnson, for not addressing officers as "sir"). Hamer was then taken to a cell where two inmates were ordered, by the state trooper, to beat her using a baton. The police ensured she was held down during the almost fatal beating, and when she started to scream, beat her further. Hamer was also groped repeatedly by officers during the assault. When she attempted to resist, she stated, an officer "walked over, took my dress, pulled it up over my shoulders, leaving my body exposed to five men." Another in her group was beaten until she was unable to talk; a third, a teenager, was beaten, stomped on, and stripped. An activist from SNCC came the next day to see if he could help but was beaten until his eyes were swollen shut when he did not address an officer in the expected deferential manner.

Hamer was released on June 12, 1963. She needed more than a month to recuperate from the beatings and never fully recovered. Though the incident left profound physical and psychological effects, including a blood clot over her left eye and permanent damage of one of her kidneys, Hamer returned to Mississippi to organize voter registration drives, including the 1963 Freedom Ballot, a mock election, and the Freedom Summer initiative the following year.

Freedom Summer brought hundreds of college students, Black and white, to help with African American voter registration in the segregated South. In 1964, Hamer announced her candidacy for the Mississippi House of Representatives but was barred from the ballot. A year later, Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine became the first Black women to stand in the U.S. Congress when they unsuccessfully protested the Mississippi House election of 1964. Hamer also traveled extensively, giving powerful speeches on behalf of civil rights. In 1971, she helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus.

In 1968, she began a “pig bank” to provide free pigs for Black farmers to breed, raise, and slaughter. A year later, she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), buying up land that Blacks could own and farm collectively. With the assistance of donors (including famed singer Harry Belafonte), she purchased 640 acres and launched a co-op store, boutique, and sewing enterprise. She single-handedly ensured that 200 units of low-income housing were built—many still exist in Ruleville, Mississippi, today. The FFC lasted until the mid-1970s; at its heyday, it was among the largest employers in Sunflower County.

Hamer died of breast cancer at age 59 in 1977. Forty-eight years after her death, President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation's highest civilian honor, to Hamer. CLUW honors Fannie Lou Hamer and her incredible spirit and determination.

In Lasting Unity,

Sylvia J. Ramos
CLUW President