Mary Hannah Williams Thomas O'Neal (1887 – after 1974) was a Welsh-born American labor activist who wrote the only eyewitness memoir of the

Ludlow Massacre The Ludlow Massacre was a mass killing perpetrated by anti-striker militia during the Colorado Coalfield War. Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attacked a tent colon ...

, part of the

Colorado Coalfield War The Colorado Coalfield War was a major Labor dispute, labor uprising in the southern and central Colorado Front Range between September 1913 and December 1914. Striking began in late summer 1913, organized by the United Mine Workers of Ameri ...

Early life

Mary Hannah Williams was born at

Nantymoel Nant-y-moel or Nantymoel (meaning "stream from the bare mountain") is a village and includes the formerly separate village of Pricetown in the county borough of Bridgend, Wales on the River Ogmore, and is one of the constituent villages of the ...

, in the

Ogmore Valley Ogmore Valley () is a community in the Bridgend County Borough, Mid Glamorgan, Wales. Made up of the villages of Nantymoel, Ogmore Vale, Price Town and Wyndham, its population at the time of the 2001 census was 7,800, increasing to 7,954 at ...

South Wales South Wales ( ) is a Regions of Wales, loosely defined region of Wales bordered by England to the east and mid Wales to the north. Generally considered to include the Historic counties of Wales, historic counties of Glamorgan and Monmouthshire ( ...

, to parents James Williams and Mary A. Williams. Her father was a coal miner. She was married at age 17 to Tom Thomas, an American-born miner.Ronald L. Lewis
"From Nantymoel to Hollywood: The Incredible Journey of Mary Thomas"
in ''Welsh Americans: A History of Assimilation in the Coalfields'' (University of North Carolina Press 2009): 283-306. She was the mother of two daughters when she moved to

Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...

with her children in 1913, looking for her estranged miner husband.Sherna Berger Gluck
"Mary Thomas O'Neal, audio interview"
(oral history interview conducted in 1974), Scholarship @ the Beach: The CSULB Digital Repository.

In the American West

Ludlow Ludlow ( ) is a market town and civil parish in Shropshire (district), Shropshire, England. It is located south of Shrewsbury and north of Hereford, on the A49 road (Great Britain), A49 road which bypasses the town. The town is near the conf ...

, Colorado, Mary Thomas was soon involved with ongoing

United Mine Workers of America The United Mine Workers of America (UMW or UMWA) is a North American labor union best known for representing coal miners. Today, the Union also represents health care workers, truck drivers, manufacturing workers and public employees in the Unit ...

efforts to organize the miners, including her singing to the strikers. She was arrested in riots in February 1914, and spent eleven days in jail. Thomas later said she had led the camp's women and children to safety at a nearby ranch when the militia attacked their tent city in April 1914, and arranged for them to be housed and fed. She lost all her own possessions in the attack, valued at $1,500 in press accounts. Arrested and detained, she used Welsh in her jailhouse conversations with Tom Thomas, knowing that the listening guards were unlikely to comprehend them. She also led fellow prisoners in singing union anthems. After her release from jail, the union sent her and her young daughters to Washington D. C. to speak on her experiences, to raise awareness and cultivate allies for the miners' cause while a congressional committee investigated the violence during the strike. She traveled with a party including Judge Ben B. Lindsey, stayed at

Hull House Hull House was a settlement house in Chicago, Illinois, that was co-founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr. Located on the Near West Side of Chicago, Hull House, named after the original house's first owner Charles Jerald Hul ...

as a guest of

Jane Addams Laura Jane Addams (September 6, 1860May 21, 1935) was an American Settlement movement, settlement activist, Social reform, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, philosopher, and author. She was a leader in the history of s ...

, and met with President

Woodrow Wilson Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856February 3, 1924) was the 28th president of the United States, serving from 1913 to 1921. He was the only History of the Democratic Party (United States), Democrat to serve as president during the Prog ...

and other officials to discuss conditions at Ludlow. In May 1914, she testified before the

United States Commission on Industrial Relations The Commission on Industrial Relations (also known as the Walsh Commission) p. 12. was a commission created by the U.S. Congress on August 23, 1912, to scrutinize US labor law. The commission studied work conditions throughout the industrial Unit ...

in New York City. Mary Thomas lived in Utah and Nevada after the events at Ludlow and her visit to Washington D. C. She worked as a waitress and later ran a restaurant and dance hall. She married again, to Don O'Neal, in Nevada.

Later years

Mary Thomas O'Neal moved to

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

later in life, and opened a clothing shop. After

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

she visited Wales again, with her second husband. In 1950 she attended a union commemoration at the Hollywood Palladium, and in 1965 she spoke at a memorial program at Ludlow. She wrote a memoir, ''Those Damn Foreigners'' (1971), considered the only "published eyewitness account of the Ludlow massacre." She lived in the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel as an old woman, and experienced memory loss before she died, probably in the 1970s. Barbara Yule wrote a one-woman play about Mary Thomas, ''For Tomorrow We May Die'', which was performed by Tanya Perkins in Colorado in 2015.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:ONeal, Mary Thomas 1887 births 20th-century deaths Welsh activists Welsh women activists Year of death missing American people of Welsh descent British emigrants to the United States