Fannie Mooney Sellins
Martyred Union Organizer
1867 - 1919 Natrona Heights, Pennsylvania
"I am free and have a right to talk or walk any place in this country
as long as I obey the law. I have done nothing wrong.
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Fannie Sellings was as dedicated and courageous labor organizer with a national reputation for union activist. Sellings was born Frances Mooney in Ohio in 1867. She married Charles Sellins, a garmet worker in St. Louis. After his untimely death, Sellins went to work in the garment factory to support her four children. In 1913, the garment factory became the site of a bitter labor dispute. She became a leader of the strike and negotiated a settlement for 400 women strikers.
After the successful negotiation of the strike, she came to the attention fo the District President of the United Mine Workers (UMW). She was hired by the UMW and moved to PIttsburgh in 1913 to help support the union cause. In the Summer of 1919, Sellins was assigned to the Allegheny Valley to direct picketing for striking miners at Allegheny Coal and Coke. The United Mine Workers Journal called Sellins an, "Angel of Mercy.," who went into the miners' homes, talking to their wives, taking care of their sick and helping them in other ways. On August 26, 1919, she witnessed guards fatally beating Joseph Starzeleski, a picketing miner. When she intervened, deputies shot and killer her with four bullets. Sellins was 47 when she was murdered. On August 29, 1919, she was buried from St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church in New Kensington, Pennsylvania and interred at Union Cemetery in Arnold. A coroner's jury in 1919 ruled her death justifiable homicide. The union and her family raised money to hire a lawyer to press a criminal investigation and pressure officials to reopen the investigation. A grand jury in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, indicted three deputies for the killings but a trial in 1923 ended in acquittal for two of the men accused of her murder. The actual gunman, John Pearson, never appeared for his trial and never was seen again.
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