Marcia Walker-McWilliams. Reverend Addie Wyatt

Marcia Walker-McWilliams correctly asserts in her fine study of trade unionist Addie Wyatt that “the role of black women as trade unionists and active members of the labor movement and their communities ... remains woefully understudied” (6–7). Reverend Addie Wyatt makes a valuable contribution toward filling this critical gap in labor movement scholarship. Not only does this book shine a strong spotlight on black women workers at the very center of the American labor movement in the last half of the twentieth century, it also illuminates the complex relationships of faith, race, class, and gender in the human struggle for liberation from social and economic oppression of all people, regardless of race or gender. Walker-McWilliams’s story of Addie Wyatt’s remarkable life illustrates how all these categories intersected in the life of this one extraordinary woman. This is truly a story worth telling a new generation. The author, through her extensive research in archival repositories and collections, personal interviews, and oral histories, and in secondary source materials from a variety of historical disciplines (labor, religious, African American, and social movement history, to identify a few), tells this story extraordinarily well.

Faith · Oppression · Political science · Race (biology) · Scholarship · Sociology · Theology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies