We featured Ben Fletcher of the IWW last week, but it’s not possible to follow up with Black female members of the organization since no women were allowed to join. If the union had had an open door policy, though, there’s a good chance that Addie L. Wyatt would have been a member. The IWW could have used her vision and savvy in the same way the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union did, where she became the first African American woman elected as international vice president of a major union.
Born Addie Cameron on March 8, 1924, in Brookhaven, Mississippi, she was the second child and oldest daughter of Ambrose and Maggie (Nolan) Cameron. She was six years old when the family moved to Chicago in 1930. This was during the Great Depression, and like so many African Americans, her parents left the South for what they hoped were better opportunities up North.
Wyatt was 16 when she married Renaldo Wyatt, a postal finance clerk. She took on the responsibility of raising several of her younger siblings after her mother died and her father was incapacitated. One of the first jobs she applied for was as a typist for Armour and Company in 1941. She learned of the company’s duplicity when the promised job as typist turned out to be packing cans of Army rations.
In the early 1950s, Wyatt joined the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). Her leadership ability was quickly recognized by the union and she was soon up front in the fight to make sure the anti-discrimination policy remained part of the union’s pledge.
By 1955, Wyatt was working full-time on the staff of the UPWA and representing workers across five states. In her leadership role, she pushed hard for equal pay and successfully made a sizable salary breakthrough for Black, Latino, and white workers. All of this was done before the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
She was elected vice president of her branch, Local 56, in 1953, becoming the first Black woman to hold senior office in a labor union. Three years later, she was the program coordinator for District One of the UPWA. In addition to her duties and responsibilities at the union, she also began assisting Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in raising funds for the Montgomery Improvement Association.
Eleanor Roosevelt recognized Wyatt’s prominence in the union and appointed her to a position on the Labor Legislation Committee of the U.S. Commission on the Status of Women.
In her capacity at the union, she was also significantly involved in working the floors of meatpacking plants along with union obligations. The next step up the ladder of success was her membership in the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. She campaigned relentlessly for the recruitment of Black men and women to work shoulder to shoulder with the majority-white union members. In 1972, she was among the founding members of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Later, she became chair of union’s National Women’s Committee, and subsequently helped to pave the way for leadership positions for women in AFL-CIO.
Another organization that benefited from Wyatt’s insight and activism was the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974. Her voice was unequivocally outspoken on behalf of the union and its mission. “Racism and sexism,” she said, are economic issues. “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.”
A year later, in 1975, with the politician Barbara Jordan, Wyatt was the first African American woman named by Time magazine as Person of the Year.
Her commitment to her faith cannot be ignored—she was ordained, along with her husband, a minister in the Church of God. She was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority in 1983. From 1980 to 1984, she was one of Ebony magazine’s 100 Most Influential Black Americans. In 1987, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists established the Addie L. Wyatt Award. She was inducted as a laureate of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the state’s highest honor) by the governor of Illinois in 2003 in Religion and Labor.
Addie L. Wyatt was 88 when she died on March 28, 2012.
“…it’s not possible to follow up with Black female members of the organization since no women were allowed to join.”
This is entirely incorrect concerning the IWW if that is what you are saying. This union from the very first recognized the need for the working class to be organized across all racial, religious, or other lines imposed by the capitalists.
“The IWW has been accused of putting the women in the front; the truth is: the IWW does not keep them at the back – and they go to the front.” – E. Gurley Flynn.
I also give you Mother Jones, Lucy Parsons, Helen Keller, among many others. Do your reseaerch.
And I would point out Lucy Parsons was part Black, part Indigenous Native, and all Wobbly.