Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality by Marcia Walker-McWilliams (review)

A vast amount of scholarship has been written about major social movements in American history, including civil rights, labor, women's rights, and religious movements, but few studies like Marcia Walker-McWilliams's Reverend Addie Wyatt: Faith and the Fight for Labor, Gender, and Racial Equality speak to all of these movements in one comprehensive book that spans the Great Depression through the 1990s. In 266 pages and seven chapters, Walker-McWilliams uncovers the remarkable story of a hidden figure, Addie Wyatt, an African American woman who shattered the glass ceiling in the labor movement, became the first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, and later retired as one of the "highest-ranked women in the organized labor movement" (p. 3). Wyatt was not only a pioneer for women in the labor movement but also a civil rights activist, clergywoman, wife, and mother who, as Walker-McWilliams argues, had a "desire for equality and a better way of life" (p. 217).

The first two chapters of the book are very informative. They offer critical insight into how Wyatt became a leader. The reader is introduced to a young Addie Cameron, who migrated from Brookhaven, Mississippi, to Chicago, Illinois, with her family at the age of six. Walker-McWilliams describes the Cameron family's time in Brookhaven as one surrounded by racial injustices that impacted the larger community and eventually caused the family to move to Chicago. In Chicago, the Cameron family experienced extreme poverty for the first time, and Addie Cameron began to seek guidance from the strong women in her life and from her Christian faith. At the young age of sixteen, Cameron married Claude Wyatt Jr., and the two began a family immediately. Addie Wyatt went to work to help support her growing family. Her first job was in the canning line at an Armour and Company meatpacking plant.

After a series of personal setbacks that included raising her six siblings after the loss of her mother, Addie Wyatt turned her attention to finding adequate housing for her family, which she found through the Chicago Housing Authority at Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project. According to Walker-McWilliams, Wyatt's true leadership skills began to shine at Altgeld Gardens. From that point on, Wyatt seemed unstoppable; yet, as Walker-McWilliams argues throughout the study, Wyatt "was not born an activist and a leader" but "grew into these roles as a result of specific experiences in her life and a spiritual faith that refused to see poverty, racism, sexism, and discrimination as immutable structural forces" (p. 217).

Overall, Walker-McWilliams's book is very well researched, clearly written, and extremely well organized. Her use of primary sources and interviews with Addie Wyatt throughout the biography creates a personal connection that allows the reader to truly understand the complexities of labor, civil rights, women's rights, and religious movements in history. Walker-McWilliams also references a wide range of scholars when she discusses Wyatt's contribution to different social movements. The reader sees that the author has a vast understanding of scholarship about various movements that she has taken into consideration when writing this study. Finally, Reverend Addie Wyatt is an important piece of scholarship that will appeal to both scholars and nonscholars interested in social movements in history.