Nannie Leah Washburn, or commonly spelled "Nanny Washburn" (; May 3, 1900 – May 1, 1996), was an American communist labor and civil rights activist from Georgia, United States. She was known for participating in labor strikes, anti-war protests, and civil rights demonstrations throughout the South for decades, even into her 60s and 70s.
Born to a poor family of sharecroppers and textile workers, Washburn worked long hours for little pay as a child laborer in a cotton mill. She married at 15 and had five children, two of them born with blindness. Abandoned by her first husband, Washburn moved back in with her mother and met communist activists, including Angelo Herndon, who taught her about socialism and invited her and her family to join the Communist Party. She became a committed labor and civil rights activist.
During the Textile Workers' Strike of 1934, Washburn and her sister handed out leftist leaflets on the picket line at the Exposition Cotton Mill in Atlanta, Georgia. They were arrested and charged with inciting an insurrection under Georgia's slavery-era sedition and insurrection statute, which carried the death penalty. Their case received national attention from labor rights groups. After the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's statute was unconstitutional in Herndon v. Lowry, their charges were dropped.
For five years, she was married to her comrade and fellow activist, Walter Washburn, until his sudden illness and death in 1956. She continued her activism and participated in notable demonstrations during the civil rights movement. In 1965, she and her son, who was blind, walked 50 miles other activists in one of the Selma to Montgomery marches. Afterwards, they joined civil rights demonstrations in Demopolis, where she was arrested and briefly held against her will in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later, she and her son traveled to Washington D.C. to demonstrate with the Poor People's Campaign. In the 1970s, she supported striking and unemployed workers in Atlanta by participating in demonstrations that exposed her to police violence.
Early life Nannie Leah Washburn was born as Leah Leathers in 1900 in rural Douglasville, Georgia to a family of sharecroppers. Both of her parents were "radicals", and her father was a member of the Populist Party. She described how difficult life was as a sharecropper: "the landlord gets all that you have slaved for," she wrote, "[and then] you're turned out for the winter without any means of livelihood".
Her family moved to the Elizabeth cotton mill near Hapeville, after textile industry agents promised it would offer good pay. Her sisters and brothers started working at the mill; eventually almost all of them were afflicted with brown lung. Washburn said she asked the mill boss for a job when she was 7, but he refused at first and said she was too young. Still, she started working as a child laborer at the mill when she was between 8 and 11 years old. She said she worked 64 hours per week and earned only $1.37 for the entire week (). The school house was away, and she only attended for a couple months. "They wouldn't pay us sharecroppers' children no attention," she said. She said she taught herself to read when she was a teenager.
Washburn wrote about witnessing racist violence committed against her black friends and neighbors when she was a child. One day, the superintendent at the mill told all of the white people in the village to go to the mill and shut the doors. That night, black families' homes were burned down, and many black people in the community were lynched. Those who survived fled and never came back.
When she was 15, Washburn married a man with the surname Young. She described the marriage as a form of slavery and "legal prostitution", where she was forced to have children she could not afford to care for. Her husband infected her with syphilis twice, causing two of her children to be born with blindness. Washburn believed that society was "rotten" for putting women in her situation, and she wrote that "Women ought to be free". Ultimately, her husband deserted her and their five children.
Political awakening Washburn's brothers joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1918 and moved to Tacoma, Washington for work. When they came back home, they brought "a big suitcase full of literature". Washburn said she loved to hear her brothers talk about the October Revolution in Russia. "That old tsar ought to been killed years ago [because] he was living in a gold house, gold luxuries and the people have having babies in the street," her brother Archie would say. Washburn and her brothers wanted to see a revolution in the US, too.
In 1930, Washburn and her children moved in with her elderly mother in Atlanta, and she began working in the textile mills. This was during the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment levels were high and families like hers were "miserable" and in a "destitute condition". According to the city of Atlanta, as many of 25,000 out of 150,000 families received welfare assistance, but communist organizers said the city intentionally excluded many unemployed families. Washburn recalled that the city distributed rotten food leftover from the farmers market to welfare recipients, which fomented discontent among the unemployed and led to protests.
Washburn began reading The Daily Worker, a leftist newspaper, and she met two black communist organizers, Angelo Herndon and Otto Hall. It was Hall who taught her and her family about socialism and recruited them to the Communist Party. In her words, she "learned [her] ABC's of capitalism and Marxist-Leninism", and she developed class consciousness. At the time, Atlanta police targeted and arrested members of the Communist Party, making membership effectively illegal in the state of Georgia. Despite repression and limited resources, communist activists continued to organize unemployed workers in Atlanta neighborhoods. Washburn and her family attended rallies, distributed leaflets to help grow the Party, and met fellow activists like Harry Haywood. They also worked to mobilize support for Herndon after he was arrested and charged with insurrection, accused of circulating " literature" and seeking to "overthrow the government".
Early labor organizing Textile workers strike (1934) During the Textile Workers' Strike of 1934, Washburn and her sister Annie Mae Leathers were on the picket line with striking workers at the Exposition Cotton Mills in Atlanta. Annie Mae worked at the mill and was a member of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at the time. The sisters stayed at the strike for hours, encouraging workers not to return to the mill and distributing working class leaflets and reading material, including The Daily Worker newspaper and The Rank and File Federationist. They were soon arrested by Atlanta police and charged with "circulating insurrectionist literature". The bond for each of them was set to $5,000 (). Under the Georgia insurrection law, they faced the possibility of the death penalty. The sisters' arrests also sparked a new wave of raids against communist activists in Atlanta.
Washburn (then known as Leah Young) wrote a letter from prison, which was published in the The Daily Worker newspaper. In her letter, she was highly critical of the AFL and the United Textile Workers of America, and she called on workers to form their own militant "rank and file" union to oppose the "capitalist class". During a hearing a few days later, she took the stand and described the long hours, poor wages, and dangerous conditions endured by textile workers. The sisters were represented by a black attorney from the International Labor Defense (ILD) named John Greer through some of the legal proceedings, making them the first white women represented by an African American, according to historian Georgina Hickey.
Prison was difficult, and Washburn said that the matron of the women's prison beat the sisters for being communists and tried to agitate the other prisoners to kill them. Finally, after 74 days, they were released on bail, thanks to the efforts of activist Hosea Hudson, attorney Benjamin J. Davis Jr., and the ILD. However, their fates were tied to Angelo Herndon, who had been arrested in 1932, convicted of insurrection under the same Georgia statute that the sisters were charged under, and sentenced to 20 years on a chain gang. The ILD and other national organizations campaigned to repeal the statute, which they said was rooted in slavery-era laws that were designed to punish enslaved people for conspiring against their slavers. Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's insurrection statute was too vague and was unconstitutional, as it infringed on Herndon's free speech rights. With this decision, Washburn and her sister were also free, and the state of Georgia dropped the insurrection charges against them in 1939. As for the textile workers who the sisters had walked with on the picket line: they faced discrimination for striking and were blocked from reemployment. In Washburn's words: "the workers—they were sold out".
The Work Projects Administration Washburn and her family lost their jobs in the 1930s, and they went to the Work Projects Administration (WPA) for employment. She got a job as a seamstress (paid by the government through the WPA) and joined the Workers Alliance (WA) and the WPA union. When she was fired for trying to organize her workplace, the WA led protests for her and others who had lost their jobs. After a week, they were reinstated. Washburn described how her supervisor almost fainted from shock when she walked back in to the WPA office.
While Washburn acknowledged the benefits of the WPA, she rejected the notion that President Roosevelt alone was responsible for "a good New Deal". She maintained that it was the workers themselves who fought for and won their jobs: "how we won many victories was get out in droves by the thousands and thousands into Washington, White House and march, demand".
Second marriage In October 1951, Washburn married her second husband, Walter Washburn, an electrician by trade. She described him as a "comrade" who treated her as an equal. "He knew my life was tied up in the class struggle," she said, "and he was the same way". Walter was a "veteran radical" who had been on the defense committee for Angelo Herndon in the 1930s and served as an advisor to the Southern Folk School and Libraries, an educational outreach program for farmers and workers. At one point during his years of activism, he was kidnapped by the Ku Klux Klan, and they "flogged" him severely. He never fully recovered from his injuries. In January 1956, Walter fell ill and died suddenly.
Grandmother and activist Washburn was called a "radical firebrand" and a "crusader for civil rights" for her years of activism. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, when she was a grandmother and great-grandmother, she was arrested numerous times for demonstrating for civil and labor rights and for marching in anti-Vietnam War protests. For Washburn, being anti-war was connected to her civil rights and labor advocacy. At one 1969 protest against police brutality, her placard read "Support the Boys in Vietnam ... Bring them home now" on one side and "Fare Increase Hurt the Poor" on the other. She was also a Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) board member.
In 1976, folk singer-songwriter Anne Romaine wrote a protest song about Washburn titled "Georgia Cotton Mill Woman". She performed the song on the Southern Grassroots Music Tour.
Selma march and Demopolis (1965)