In Search of Home and Community: Addie Wyatt and Black Organizing in the Altgeld Gardens Housing Project, 1944–55

In the 1940s, black workers in wartime industries received much needed housing opportunities in public housing projects across the nation. During this period, “public housing was paradise” and provided opportunities for working class African Americans to have safe, affordable and comfortable housing. In Chicago, the Altgeld Gardens housing project became the site of a self-sustaining and highly organized black community with its own shops, schools, churches and political organizations. Essential to this organizing, was the work of community, labor and faith-based activists like Addie Wyatt and her husband Claude Wyatt, who opened up their home to neighborhood youth and eventually established the Wyatt Choral Ensemble in 1947 to provide a space for youth to grow closer to God and gain a positive sense of self. Experiencing both the merits of decent housing and the limits of racially segregated housing opportunities, this paper will explore black organizing at Altgeld and the centrality of black women’s commitments to work, home, and collective community determination in the immediate post-war era.