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The Rev. Addie L. Wyatt, 1924-2012

The Rev. Addie L. Wyatt was one of the country’s foremost champions for organized labor and civil rights.

As a union leader, she fought for principles of worker rights such as equal pay for equal work and leadership roles for minorities and women, and she was the first female president of a local chapter of the United Packinghouse Workers of America.

She worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Improvement Association in Alabama and endured violent opposition during marches with King in Chicago in the 1960s.

In 1955, she and her husband, the Rev. Claude S. Wyatt Jr., founded the Vernon Park Church of God, leading a group of about 25 people in a renovated garage. By 2000, the congregation had grown to nearly 1,000.

“Rev. Wyatt was at the forefront of four movements at the same time — political, community, church and civil rights,” said goddaughter and administrative aide Marilyn Cannon.

The Rev. Wyatt, 88, died Wednesday, March 28, at Advocate Trinity Hospital on the South Side after a long illness, Cannon said. She had been a resident of the South Side since moving to Chicago from Mississippi in 1930.

“It’s important to know that Addie Wyatt is an example of the power of one,” said Carol Adams, president and CEO of the DuSable Museum of African American History. “As one individual, she was able to impact some of the most significant areas of our time.”

Born in Brookhaven, Miss., the former Addie Cameron and her family came north during the Depression after a conflict between her father and his white boss in Mississippi. They settled in the Bronzeville neighborhood, and she attended DuSable High School, where she met her future husband.

The Rev. Wyatt and her husband led a gospel group called the Wyatt Singers and occasionally performed with gospel legend Mahalia Jackson. She took a job in the cannery of the Armour & Co. meatpacking company in 1941 and joined the UPWA the next year.

Rising from a union delegate to vice president to president of the UPWA, the Rev. Wyatt was a tireless worker for equal justice and a leader in the field of labor at a time when women — in particular, African-American women — rarely held such positions.

“She was part of that generation of great warrior-queens that said, ‘Where help is needed, that’s where I’m going to be,'” Adams said.

In 1961, the Rev. Wyatt was appointed by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to serve on the Protective Labor Legislation Committee of President John Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and she later served three terms on the Illinois Commission on the Status of Women.

“She was a very spiritual woman but (had) the ability to listen and see through an argument very clearly,” said Harold Rogers, former chairman of the African-American studies department at Olive-Harvey College in Chicago. “That was the way (she had) always been — a very poised person.”

Rogers met the Rev. Wyatt in 1972 when she was an international representative for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen union. He remembers her tenacity in battling a multitude of challenges faced by women and minorities in the workplace and the city of Chicago.

“She was a fighter for everything that was good in our community,” he said.

The Rev. Wyatt was the first female international vice president of the AMCBW and served as director of its human rights, women’s affairs and civil rights departments, and director of civil rights and women’s affairs after the organization merged with the Retail Clerks International Union in 1979. She retired from the labor movement in 1984.

“She broke barriers,” Adams said. “You don’t see women doing now what she did then.”

The Rev. Wyatt campaigned for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment and was a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.

“Rev. Wyatt, along with her husband … played an important role in my development,” U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush said in a statement. “Her courage, steadfastness and intellect are the foundation on which many of us still stand.”

For all of her political and professional influence, the Rev. Wyatt was equally influential in the lives of the members of her church.

“She could call every child by name,” Cannon said. “And if she knew you, she could call your name, your wife’s name, your mommy and daddy, all your cousins and nephews, and if she hasn’t seen you in two weeks, she’d say, ‘How come you weren’t at church?'”

The Rev. Wyatt is remembered as a humble and quiet force, with a lifetime of distinguished accomplishments and the ability to treat everyone — from presidents to her congregation — with equal importance.

“We all feel — and are going to feel — her presence in the community and around the country,” said civil rights veteran Willie Barrow, who was mentored in organized labor by the Rev. Wyatt.

“She was a labor leader, a union leader, and (she) was a church leader,” Barrow said. “She had it all together.”

The Rev. Wyatt’s husband died in 2010. She is survived by a son, Claude Wyatt III, and a sister, Maude McKay.

The Rev. Wyatt’s body will lie in state from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Friday at Vernon Park Church of God, 9011 S. Stony Island Ave., Chicago. A wake is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Saturday at the church, followed by services at noon.