Rev. Addie Wyatt

Rev. Addie Wyatt was a labor leader, religious leader, and civil rights and women’s rights activist.

At 16, Addie married Claude Wyatt Jr. and the couple had two children. In search of work to help support her family, Addie Wyatt applied for a job as a typist in an Armour & Company meatpacking plant in 1941. At that time, however, black women were barred from holding clerical positions in the company so she was put to work canning stew for the army. In 1942, she joined the United Packinghouse Workers of America [UPWA], a labor union which had a significant and active African American and female membership. Addie Wyatt’s concern for the rights of working people, women, and minorities, and her belief in the organized labor movement led to her becoming a leader in the UPWA. In 1954 she became the first African American female president of a UPWA local. In 1968, her union merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters of North America and Wyatt became the founding director of its Women’s Affairs Department. She became the union’s first female International Vice President in 1976. That same year she was honored as one of TIME Magazine’s “Twelve Women of the Year.”

An ordained minister in the Church of God, she and her husband, Rev. Claude Wyatt, founded the Vernon Park Church of God in 1955 in Chicago and were quite active in the city’s politics and community organizing. She worked in the ministry and civil rights campaign of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and participated in major civil rights marches, including the March on Washington, and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. She was active in civil rights struggles in the South and in Chicago working for voting rights, open housing, and better education. She was a member of President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1962. As a women’s rights advocate, she worked tirelessly for better healthcare, child care, and equal pay for working women, as well as for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

For more information about Rev. Addie Wyatt, read an in-depth interview with her for the Working Women’s History Project at: https://wwhpchicago.org/the-reverend-addie-l.-wyatt.html.

Click here to return to BLACK HISTORY MONTH page

Click here to return to UPCOMING EVENTS page