Lonnie Nelson papers and photographs, approximately 1930-2014

Madelon Sue “Lonnie” Nelson was born in Seattle on Aug. 20, 1932, to parents Alma Viola Nickerson Nelson and Burt Gale Nelson. Her father was a founding member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and was beaten by police while trying to organize longshore workers in New Orleans in the late 1930’s. He was also a leader in the Communist Party of Washington State. While in high school in 1948, Lonnie Nelson organized Young Progressives and was active in the Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace. She joined the Communist Party in 1951 at a time when CP members, including her father, were being blacklisted and harassed by the FBI. In the Party, Nelson became close friends with Earl George, a Black longshore worker and Civil Rights activist. In 1953, her brother Ken Nelson died after being beaten by police.

In the 1950’s, she gathered signatures on the Stockholm Peace Appeal when Cold War elements were itching for war against the Soviet Union or China. During this time, she traveled to Spain where veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, including her uncle, were honored as fighters against Franco fascism. She later helped mobilize peace protests in solidarity with Cuba and Vietnam.

Nelson was involved in the Civil Rights movement and moved her family to Seattle’s Central District, a majority Black neighborhood, to promote desegregation and expose her children to integrated schools. She served as chairperson of a petition campaign against the McCarthy-era loyalty oath, which in 1972 presented 10,000 signatures to the state attorney general in Olympia. Later, she served on a committee defending the Black Panther Party.

In the 1960’s and early 1970’s, Nelson became involved in Indigenous liberation struggles, and she joined in the campaign to win restoration of tribal fishing rights in Washington state. She befriended many Indigenous activists in that struggle, working closely with Nisqually leader Maiselle Bridges and her family. Victory was won when Judge George Boldt handed down his landmark ruling in 1975 that the tribes were entitled to half the salmon catch. Nelson was a member of the CP’s Commission on Indian Liberation and worked as a correspondent for the CP publications People’s World and the Daily Worker. She joined the "Trail of Broken Treaties" to Washington, D.C., in 1972, when the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters, and she helped raise funds for the legal defense of the occupiers. Nelson knew Hank Adams and other AIM leaders personally and interviewed them for articles in the Daily World.

Nelson was involved in the labor movement for most of her life. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, she worked in the food packing industry and helped organize workers into the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers. She was a member of ILWU Auxiliary Number 3 and filed a sex discrimination grievance against the union after being denied B-class registration in the early 1980’s. Nelson was employed at a daycare center at Providence Hospital and was active in her union, Service Employees International Union, Local 6. In addition, she helped establish the Seattle branch of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), heading up the CLUW Public Works Jobs Committee. She was arrested three times for civil disobedience: during the Indigenous fishing rights struggle, against South African apartheid, and in the mid-1990s against Republican Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" Medicare cuts.

Nelson retired in 1993 and remained active in the labor movement through Seattle Mothers for Police Accountability, Jobs With Justice, and the CP. She died on February 12, 2014.

(Source: People's World obituary for Lonnie Nelson by Tim Wheeler 02/14/14 http://www.peoplesworld.org/labor-stalwart-lonnie-nelson-dies-at-8/)