This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 11/17/2022
[CIVIL RIGHTS] [LABOR RIGHTS] WYATT, Addie (1924-2012). Archive of African American and pioneering civil rights activist and labor leader, Addie Wyatt. [Chicago: 1960s] Housed in six large and heavy cartons, this is a unique collection comprised of correspondence, literature, publications, labor agreements, thousands of documents, pamphlets, booklets, letters (signed and unsigned). This archive documents Ms. Wyatt’s important role in the struggle for civil and labor rights, equal rights and pay, voter registration, sex discrimination, and the Chicago Freedom Movement, War on Poverty, SNCC, and others. Includes dozens of original photographs, all from the 1960s, from the collection of someone who spent decades on the front lines. Although these items have the typical wear one would expect, they are an important historical chronicle of a turbulent time. Provenance: From the estate of Addie and Claude Wyatt, Jr. The Reverends Addie and Claude Wyatt, Jr. were fixtures of the American Civil Rights movement through the second half of the 20th century. Addie began her career working with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America in Chicago in 1941. Together they founded Chicago’s Vernon Park Church of God in 1956, and for the next twelve years were closely associated with Dr. Martin Luther King’s peace movement, joining him at the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery Marches in 1965, and the Chicago demonstration in 1966. In the early 1960s Eleanor Roosevelt appointed Addie to a position on the Labor Legislation Committee on the United States Commission on the Status of Women. A vital force in the arena of labor rights, she founded the Coalition of Labor Union Women in 1974. The following year she and Barbara Jordan became the first African American women to be honored as Persons of the Year by Time Magazine. Claude Wyatt, Jr. served as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Chicago director of the Ministerial Leadership Movement and as a board member of People United to Serve Humanity (PUSH).