Black Women Workers and "Comrade Sisters": Gendering the Labor and Black Power Movements

With these recently published monographs, Marcia Walker-McWilliams and Robyn C. Spencer use different approaches to explore the intersections of race, class, and gender in the late twentieth century. Read together, these studies reconstruct an optimism that permeated social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, a belief that change was both possible and attainable. Using gender as a primary category of analysis and situating narratives in urban communities and workplaces outside of the South, Walker-McWilliams and Spencer complicate interpretations of the goals, strategies, and primary actors in the labor movement, civil rights movement, and women's movement of the late 20^th century. Walker-McWilliams and Spencer skillfully demonstrate that for women outside of the South who found themselves at the intersection of race, gender, labor, and religion, federal civil rights legislation did not represent their only goals and the struggle for equality and justice extended beyond the mid-1960s.

Walker-McWilliams presents a nuanced and intimate biography of labor activist and minister Addie Cameron Wyatt. Born in Mississippi, Addie Cameron moved with her family to Chicago during the Depression years. The move meant leaving relative economic security to enter a world of grinding poverty in the sprawling metropolis. Addie Cameron's early years were shaped by her mother's example of self-reliance and insistence on education as a path forward. At sixteen, Addie Cameron married Claude Wyatt and at seventeen, she found a job at one of Chicago's meatpacking plants. She worked on the line until her election as the first African American woman president of Local 56 of the United Packinghouse Workers Association (UPWA). From there, Wyatt became head of the union's Women's Rights Division, was appointed to President John F. Kennedy's Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, and ultimately served as international vice president and Director of Civil Rights and Women's Affairs for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). In addition to her leadership in organized labor, Addie Wyatt was an ordained minister. In 1955, the Wyatts, both ordained ministers, founded Vernon Park Church of God on Chicago's South Side, building a significant social institution that ministered to the surrounding community. In this biography, Walker-McWilliams seamlessly weaves the strands of Wyatt's life together, effectively demonstrating how the threads "bind together the often disparate ideological narratives of organized labor, civil rights, women's rights, and religious movements" (p. 8).

While Addie Wyatt's name may not be immediately recognizable, the focus of Robyn C. Spencer's The Revolution Has Come is central to narratives of the civil rights movement and radical politics in the United States. Spencer provides a comprehensive history of the Black Panther Party (BPP). She traces the Party's roots to the widening racial and class divisions in postwar Oakland, reflected in instances of police brutality and discriminatory housing and employment practices. In 1966, Merritt College students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton drafted the BPP's 10-Point Program and worked the streets, sharing their ideas and encouraging primarily young people to join the Party. In these early years, the BPP quickly drew attention as members "policed the police," by claiming and exercising Second Amendment rights as a means to protect African Americans from overly aggressive city police. In the eyes of city, state, and federal officials, armed BPP members posed a threat to national security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) initiated a sustained effort to undermine and neutralize the organization. Most histories of the BPP end at this point, in the arrests and deaths of central leaders. The BPP, however, continued for a decade more. Drawing on BPP archival records, oral history interviews, and...