Addie Wyatt was a remarkable woman, yet she has not achieved the same iconic status as contemporaries such as Ella Baker, Pauli Murray, or Rosa Parks. Marcia Walker-McWilliams's welcome new biography aims to elevate Wyatt into the historical company she deserves. In narrating and deeply contextualizing Wyatt's story, Walker-McWilliams demonstrates how Wyatt's life mirrors the trajectory of major themes in twentieth-century history, including the “great migration” of African Americans to the urban North, the rise of the industrial labor movement, and the northern civil rights movement. Undergirding her experiences of these momentous events was Wyatt's deep religious faith, which consistently informed her activism. To Walker-McWilliams, Wyatt's life—illustrating, as it does, the overlapping importance of race, gender, class, and religion—exemplifies the relevance of “intersectional” analyses championed by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Gloria Jean Watkins (more commonly known as “bell hooks”), and others (7).

Born in Brookhaven, Mississippi, in 1924, Wyatt spent her childhood in the South. In 1930, like many black Mississippians, Wyatt's family migrated to Chicago. There, they struggled with poverty and segregation but gained strength and community from their church. By the early 1940s, Wyatt began working at the meatpacker Armour & Company and, in 1940, married her high school sweetheart, Claude Wyatt (the marriage lasted for sixty-nine years, until Claude's death). In the 1950s, Wyatt—already a busy wife, mother, church leader, and worker—gradually became a public figure. In 1953, she was coaxed into seeking a leadership position in Local 56 of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, and, at thirty years old, Wyatt was elected the local's vice president (72–73). From this point on, Wyatt emerged as an omnipresent leader in Chicago's labor, civil rights, and women's movements. She collaborated with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson in desegregation efforts, served on the President's Commission on the Status of Women and the Coalition of Labor Union Women, and participated in A. Philip Randolph's Negro American Labor Council while consistently pushing her union to be a vital advocate for women and minorities.

Readers of this journal will be especially interested in the central role of religion in Wyatt's life and activism. Faith was deeply woven into every part of Wyatt's life. As a poor child in Chicago, Wyatt remembered that her mother always turned to prayer, and church formed the basis of her community. By age twelve, Wyatt was chief musician of the Langley Avenue Church of God youth choir (25–27). Music remained a major expression of Wyatt's spirituality, and Walker-McWilliams nicely places Wyatt in the context of the Chicago gospel scene. In 1947, while living in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex, Wyatt and her husband co-founded the Wyatt Choral Ensemble. This effort “marked a turning point in the development of their faith and leadership abilities” (60); indeed, Walker-McWilliams persuasively suggests that the Ensemble provided Addie with the pride, confidence, and ethos that would enable her emergence as a labor and civil rights leader. But entering the world of secular activism did not diminish her ambitions as a religious leader. Inspired by the success of the Ensemble, Claude and Addie founded their own church, the Vernon Park Church of God, on Chicago's south side, in 1955. Immediately, the church became an ally of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and major participant in civil rights struggles, including the Selma march of 1965, which Addie attended (96–97). Finally, in 1968, Wyatt became one of the few women to be ordained by the Northern Illinois Ministerial Assembly of the Church of God (150); she had become Reverend Addie Wyatt.

Walker-McWilliams smartly demonstrates that Wyatt's religious commitment was not mere window dressing on her secular activism; rather, activism was Wyatt's way of tangibly expressing a clear set of theological and moral understandings. Walker-McWilliams produces numerous sources, both from Wyatt's own comments and from the observations of others, to conclude that the belief in an affirming, universalistic theology, one that saw the “humanity and dignity of all people,” was the key element in Wyatt's success as a labor and civil rights leader (151). And this theology, Walker-McWilliams concludes, was the product of the “intersectionality of [Wyatt's] life's experiences—her faith and family history in the Church of God; her personal experiences with poverty, racism, and sexism; and her movement activism and leadership” (155).

Walker-McWilliams makes especially interesting points when discussing the intersection between Wyatt's faith and gender. There were, of course, deeply patriarchal aspects of American religion in general and Addie's tradition in particular—during her ordination examination, she was explicitly asked whether she obeyed her husband (150). But, growing up in a church environment dominated by women, Wyatt always assumed that women were natural leaders in the church. After she and Claude co-founded their church, Wyatt chafed against restrictive identities, such as the traditional helpmate role of “pastor's wife,” and argued instead that God created men and women as equal partners in life. God, Wyatt thought, intended a unified humanity of equals, not a fractured society riven by rank and hierarchy. Walker-McWilliams suggests that Wyatt was in the vanguard of progressive religious thinking, foreshadowing developments in liberation theology, feminist theology, and “womanist” theology.

Occasionally, Walker-McWilliams's strategy of contextualizing Wyatt's life leads into tangents or side stories that are well documented elsewhere—her description of the southern civil rights movement or societal disagreements over the Equal Rights Amendment, for instance, will not surprise most historians. More importantly, Wyatt's own story is sometimes lost in these contextual asides. However, this minor complaint does not detract from Walker-McWilliams's significant primary research and thoughtful engagement with secondary literature. She has succeeded in establishing Addie Wyatt as a worthy figure of attention.