Timpson, Anne Burlak.

Communist Party official; Labor organizer. Born Anne Burlak to Ukrainian immigrants in Slatington, Pennsylvania, 1911, she attended school until age 14, then worked in silk mills in Bethlehem and Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1925-29. In 1927 she met labor organizer Ella Reeve Bloor and was inspired to join the Young Communist League and was a delegate to the founding convention of the National Textile Workers Union (NTWU) in 1928. She joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1929. She lost several jobs trying to organize fellow mill workers, so began organizing full-time. In 1930 she and five others, known as the Atlanta Six, were arrested under Georgia's insurrection law for addressing an interracial audience. She was elected national secretary of the NTWU in 1933, the first American women to hold such a high post in a labor union. Timpson's parents and brothers returned to the Ukraine in 1932 and she visited them there in 1936. She married Arthur Timpson in 1939 and they had two children. They lived in Boston where she was a state-level officer for the Communist Party in Massachusetts. She was subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities (Dies Committee) in 1939; was indicted under the Smith Act in 1956 and under the McCarran Act in 1964. Timpson retired in 1981 and spent the last few decades of her life involved in local politics, fighting for better schools, housing, jobs, and health care; continued her fights against racism, classism, and sexism; and was involved in the peace movement and nuclear disarmament. She remained a member of the Communist Party until her death in 2002.