Rev. Addie Wyatt, union leader, dies

CHICAGO -- 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.

Wyatt, 88, died Wednesday, at Advocate Trinity Hospital in Chicago after a long illness, said Marilyn Cannon, Wyatt's administrative aide. 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 chief executive 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., 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.

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.

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Rising from a union delegate to vice president to president of the UPWA, 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.

In 1961, Wyatt was appointed to 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.

Wyatt was the first female international vice president of the Amalgamated Meatcutters and Butcher Workers union and was 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.

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.

Wyatt was equally influential in the lives of the members of the Vernon Park Church of God, which she founded with her husband, the Rev. Claude S. Wyatt Jr.

"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 . . . and if she hasn't seen you in two weeks, she'd say, 'How come you weren't at church?' "

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 Wyatt.

"She was a labor leader, a union leader, and [she] was a church leader," Barrow said. "She had it all together."

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