Reverend Addie Wyatt

"Labor leader, civil rights activist, outspoken feminist, African American clergywoman--Reverend Addie Wyatt stood at the confluence of many rivers of change in twentieth century America. The first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, Wyatt worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt and appeared as one of Time magazine's Women of the Year in 1975. Marcia Walker-McWilliams tells the incredible story of Addie Wyatt and her times. What began for Wyatt as a journey to overcome poverty became a lifetime commitment to social justice and the collective struggle against economic, racial, and gender inequalities. Walker-McWilliams illuminates how Wyatt's own experiences with hardship and many forms of discrimination drove her work as an activist and leader. A parallel journey led her to develop an abiding spiritual faith, one that denied defeatism by refusing to accept such circumstances as immutable social forces"-- "Reverend Addie Wyatt (1924-2012) was one of the most influential African American female labor leaders in the twentieth century. Wyatt lived in Chicago for most of her life and while there became a nationally known civil rights activist, ordained minister, and outspoken feminist. She was the first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, worked alongside Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in Alabama and during marches in Chicago, and Eleanor Roosevelt appointed her to the Protective Labor Legislation Committee of President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women. In this biography, Walker-McWilliams tells the story of the reverend's commitment to social justice, which fueled her activism and leadership in the American labor movement, while also setting her life story in the sociohistorical climate in which Wyatt emerged. Walker-McWilliams argues that what began for Wyatt as an individual journey to break away from poverty became a commitment to a collective struggle against economic, racial, and gender inequalities and a lifetime of organizing and activism. Based on oral histories, interviews conducted with Wyatt's colleagues and families, Wyatt's collection of personal papers, and extensive archival data, Walker-McWilliams illuminates the ways Wyatt grew into the roles of activist and leader as a result of personal experiences with poverty, racism, sexism, and discrimination, and developed a spiritual faith that refused to see these circumstances as immutable structural forces"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.