Arnetta Wallace

As a former president of Alpha Kappa Alpha, a member of the NCNW board, a social activist, and wife of a distinguished Baptist minister and educator, Wallace played an important role on this trip. Her job was to meet the women in the black community. Some of them, such as Clairie Collins Harvey, were upper middle class, independent, well educated, sophisticated, and very well traveled. Others were not. Some were afraid of retribution for civil rights activities. Others were not. Wallace met with as many of these women as possible and worked both within the black community to provide support and outside the black community to foster communications between white and black women.

Schedule
Wallace received both phone numbers and a schedule of activities for her WIMS trip. Her contacts included Doris Wilson, the WIMS black staff member in Jackson, and the head of the branch YWCA. Her schedule included where all of her team members stayed and their activities. In Canton, on Wednesday, she visited a voter registration project, a freedom school, a community center, and heard Annie Devine, Canton WIMS coordinator and Secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, speak at lunch. Wallace stayed in Jackson with Aurelia and Jack Young, noted civil rights activists.
Report
After the Chicago WIMS team returned home, the group made an oral report recording their trip. Wallace described two events. The first was about the NAACP mass meeting she had attended on Tuesday evening, along with Etta Moten Barnett, Jean Davis, Lucy Montgomery, and Sylvia Weinberg. The second concerned the interracial prayer fellowship meeting at the Pearl Street A.M.E. Church and meeting with WomenPower Unlimited.
Arnetta Wallace: A Civil Rights Leader in Chicago
The Chicago Defender was a national and citywide African American newspaper. Because she was an important woman in black society, Baptist circles, and civil rights activism, the Defender often reported her activities.
- To Be Women's Day Speaker - May 23, 1964
  A couple of months before she went to Mississippi with WIMS, Wallace spoke to the Maryland Avenue Baptist Church. This article gives some sense of Wallace’s civil role.
- Woman on the Go - February 20, 1965
  Not only did Wallace work with WIMS, as a board member of the NCNW she also became part of Women in Community Service (WICS) where she continued to participate in activities jointly sponsored by a variety of women’s organizations.
- NAACP Women Acclaimed for Most Successful Tea Affair - April 10, 1965
  The NAACP acknowledged Wallace’s importance when they named her one of fifty-five distinguished Chicago citizens. Edith Sampson was another. Legal council to the NCNW, Sampson was the first woman black delegate to the United Nations. In 1962 she was elected judge to the Chicago Municipal Court, a Chicago first.
- Antioch's Speaker - July 11, 1965
  As Executive Dean of the Chicago Baptist Institute, the Reverend Robert C. Wallace was also an important civic leader in Chicago.
Arnetta Wallace and Alpha Kappa Alpha
Wallace was President of AKA from 1953 to 1958, and remained a key figure in the sorority thereafter. When she died, AKA printed a short biography and tribute in her memory.
Photographs of Arnetta Wallace in the 1960s and the 1990s.