Biography
Anne Burlak Timpson, known as "the Red Flame," was a legendary labor organizer and Massachusetts Communist Party leader. The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, she left school at 14 to work in a silk mill, joined the Communist Party at 16, and in 1933 was elected national secretary of the National Textile Workers Union — reportedly the first American woman to hold so high a union post. The press dubbed her "the Red Flame" for her fiery mill-gate speeches during the great New England textile strikes of the 1930s, a label the mill workers adopted with affection. In 1956 she was among the last Americans arrested under the Smith Act, charged with conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the government; the case was dropped for lack of evidence after the Yates decision.
