Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,793

This is the grave of Addie Wyatt.

Born in 1924 in Brookhaven, Mississippi, Wyatt grew up poor. Her family got out of Mississippi in 1930, following the Great Migration to Chicago. That was no easy time either, not as the Great Depression deepened and Black Chicagoans were often the first to lose their jobs. She married Claude Wyatt in 1940, when she was only 16. She was already mostly taking care of her little siblings by this time, as her mom had died at age 39 and her father had serious illness problems too.

So in 1941, Wyatt, needing to do her part to bring in money for the family, applied for a job as a typist for Armour and Company, the meatpacking firm. She was hired, but then told on her first day that was a white job and was sent to the cannery to pack beef stew in cans for the military. She stayed there through the war and eventually she found her way to the United Packinghouse Workers of America. The UPWA was one of the best unions on racial issues in the country. UPWA leadership didn’t put up with racism and it was a good thing too because packinghouse work was rough and so whites were trying to get out of it. A white dominated union would have failed. Wyatt was impressed with what she saw of the UPWA so she became a union activist. She started becoming a leader on the shop floor in fighting both gender and racial discrimination. This caught the attention of UPWA leaders and in 1955, they hired her to work for the union itself.

Wyatt became a key leader at UPWA and remained one of the great union leaders of America for the rest of her life. She became a staffer for the union, traveling across a five-state area to represent them. That happened in 1955. The same year, she and her husband started their own church. This was an activist church and by 1956, they were connected with the young Montgomery minister Martin Luther King, Jr. They were active in raising funds for the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization of civil rights activists leading the bus boycott there. That led to a long history between King and the Wyatts, with him often speaking at their church when he came to the city.

Wyatt’s work connecting civil rights and labor rights in a white supremacist and sexist world led Eleanor Roosevelt to name her to the Labor Legislation Committee of the United States Commission on the Status of Women in the early 60s. Wyatt was a major player in labor’s support for the civil rights movement. She was a founding member of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, seeking to push forward a civil rights agenda in the labor movement.

What I know Wyatt for is her role in the founding of the Coalition of Labor Union Women. The CLUW was created in June 1973 under the leadership of Olga Madar, Vice-President of the United Auto Workers and Addie Wyatt.

After a few smaller organizing conferences around the country, 3200 women met in Chicago on March 23 and March 24, 1974 for the CLUW’s foundational meeting. The meeting took a challenging tone to the chauvinistic attitudes of organized labor. Said Myra Wolfgang of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders Union, “You can call Mr. Meany and tell him there are 3000 women in Chicago and they didn’t come here to swap recipes!” The meeting set aside time for women to voice openly the problems they faced as trade union women.

Like many moments in the feminist movement, the CLUW helped isolated women around the country realize there were many others who faced their predicament. It gave them a collective power not unlike the consciousness-raising meetings that marked the feminism of the early 70s. The CLUW announced its solidarity with Gloria Steinem and the National Organization of Women; in fact, Steinem was there as a representative of American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. In doing so, the CLUW leadership set the organization as a close ally of mainstream feminism, which alienated radical women to some extent, but probably made political sense in a climate where labor’s leadership was not particularly supportive of its existence.

Organized labor’s immediate response to all of this? The UAW sent a message of support. AFL-CIO President George Meany said nothing at all and neither did most internationals. But as Wyatt stated, “Racism and sexism is an economic issue. It was very profitable to discriminate against women and against people of color. I began to understand that change could come but you could not do it alone. You had to unite with others. That was one of the reasons I became a part of the union. It was a sort of family that would help in the struggle.”

The problem for the CLUW was that it didn’t have a concrete mission. Wyatt and Madar both were total badasses, but they were team players and they were only going to take their critique of the labor movement so far. Plus, once CLUW chapters were established locally, what exactly was their mission. When researching a labor figure based in Seattle, I ran across some documents about the CLUW there. It was falling apart and the reason won’t surprise you–some of the younger women were trying to hijack the organization to push their version of socialism, which definitely was not the mission and was causing older members to drop out. I am shocked by left infighting. Shocked I tell you!

In 1975, Wyatt, along with Barbara Jordan, Betty Ford, and Billie Jean King, was named Time’s Woman of the Year. Why do we not remember Wyatt nearly as much as these other three women? The answer is pretty simple–we as Americans–we as liberals for that matter–simply don’t care about the labor movement very much. Ford and King are of course still famous and being a First Lady and a tennis legend maybe gives you a heads up. But Jordan remains an absolute legend in liberal circles, and rightfully so. Again, why isn’t Wyatt? It’s basically because late 20th century and 21st century liberals don’t really care about the labor movement, not in any way except the most passing fancy, as suggested by the Clinton and Obama presidencies and the kind of people they worked for. After all, Kamala Harris did win voters who made more than $100,000 a year while the working class flees toward Donald Trump. There are many reasons for this, but the Clintonian hostility toward unions that dominated a generation of more of Democratic Party leaders and many voters too is a big piece of the problem.

In 1976, Wyatt became the first African-American woman to hold an executive position within an American union, as VP of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. That became the United Food and Commercial Workers after a 1979 merger and Wyatt remained in her position. Later in life, as a senior figure in Chicago organizing and political circles, she got to know a young ambitious man named Barack Obama, who she encouraged and counseled along his way, not that he particularly listened to her on labor matters. She stopped preaching in 2000, when her health began to slip, though she had a lot of years left.

Wyatt died in 2012. She was 88 years old.

Addie Wyatt is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.

If you would like this series to visit other women who were great labor leaders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Myra Wolfgang is in Livonia, Michigan and Su Ko Lee is in Oakland, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.