Kartar Dhillon

Kartar Dhillon's father, Bakshish Singh Dhillon was one of the first Punjabi Sikh pioneers to arrive in the United States in 1897, with her mother, Rattan Kaur joining him in 1910. She was the fourth child out of the total eight in the family. From 1916 to 1922, she and her family lived in Astoria, Oregon, where she and her siblings attended school and her father worked at a lumber mill. He was active in labor activism, once working to gain Indian American support for an International Workers of the World strike. The family moved to California in 1922. Dhillon recalled that at the time, there were only three Sikh families in the state. Her father died in about 1927, and her mother in 1932, leaving her to help raise younger siblings. She graduated high school the same year, in 1932. == Adult life ==

In 1932, in the face of family pressure to have an arranged marriage, Kartar Dhillon secretly married Surat Singh Gill, a member of the Ghadar Party, and a student at UC Berkeley. She would hide the marriage from her family until she was visibly pregnant. During World War II, she worked as a machinist and truck driver from the Marine Corps. She was survived by two children, nine grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. == Political activism ==

While Dhillon was born into a family associated with the Ghadar Party, much of her work was focused on the United States. Over the course of her life, she would support issues like affirmative action, the Black Panther Party, freeing political prisoners like Geronimo Pratt, supporting prisoners on death row, labor unions, farm workers organizing for a union in California's Central Valley, and the Korean reunification movement. A long-time member of the Office and Professional Employees International Union, she joined the picket line when the union went on strike. Dhillon's daughter Ayesha Gill said, "What was great about Kartar was not only her political activism and her strength of belief in fighting for working people and for justice for them, but on a very human level, she was so compassionate…It wasn't a cerebral thing, it was an automatic human response." == Writing and art ==

According to a KQED profile, "She studied art and literature to fulfill her own personal passions, and shorthand and bookkeeping to support her family. She scraped together money to take her kids to museums, lectures, plays and operas. She found donated tickets for symphony performances. She sent the children for music lessons, taught them how to play chess and rented bicycles with them in Golden Gate Park." She also wrote for ''People's World'', a socialist newspaper. == External links ==

• The film Turbans, about a Sikh family in Astoria, Oregon in 1918, is based on Dhillon's memoirs and is directed by her granddaughter, Erika Surat Andersen. • Kartar Dhillon and Kala Bagai are the subjects of the South Asian Women's History Mural in Berkeley, California, designed by artist Sabina Kariat and ARTogether. == See also ==