English: Biography: An ordained minister, and pastor and founder of the Perpetual Mission for Saving Souls of All Nations in Detroit, Charleszetta Waddles has been described as a "one-woman war on poverty." After the death of her father, Henry Campbell, when she was twelve, she left school to work as a maid and to care for her frail mother, Ella Brown Campbell. By the age of 19, she had been married and widowed and was herself a mother. A resourceful and tireless worker, she was a sorter in a rag factory and did domestic work. Married again to Le Roy Wash in 1936, she moved to Detroit. Due to her husband's unemployment a few years later, she and her five children were forced to go on welfare. During World War II, she and the children went to St. Louis to care for her dying mother. Upon returning to Detroit, as the mother of six, she applied for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. She lived for a time in a common-law marriage with Roosevelt, Sturkey and had four more children. She did not marry, fearing that the federal aid to the older children would be eliminated; her overriding concern was to keep all ten children together as a family. In 1956 she married Payton Waddles. Ordained a minister in a nondenominational church in 1956, she held prayer meetings for a group of six women who sought ways to creatively help others. In 1957, with food and clothing collected from this small group, she began what was to grow into the Perpetual Mission for Saving Souls of All Nations, a nonprofit association that exists entirely on private donations of material, money, and services. It reaches over 100,000 people a year, offering food, clothing, furniture, job training and placement, a variety of medical and legal services, and sponsoring low-cost housing. There are branches of the Mission in ten African countries, the first established in Ghana in 1974. Recognized by a United States President, governors, sororities, and social service agencies, she has received more than 100 honors and awards including the 1968 Sojourner Truth Award from the Detroit Club of the NACWC and the1973 Distinguished Citizen Award from Michigan State University. Mother Waddles, as she is called, has authored a tralnlng manual for missionaries and two cookbooks. She has also pulished an autobiography, Mother and the Way She Waddles, by Faith, and Self- Awareness According to the Holy Scriptures.

Description: The Black Women Oral History Project interviewed 72 African American women between 1976 and 1981. With support from the Schlesinger Library, the project recorded a cross section of women who had made significant contributions to American society during the first half of the 20th century. Photograph taken by Judith Sedwick
Repository: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
Collection: Black Women Oral History Project
Research Guide: http://guides.library.harvard.edu/schlesinger_bwohp

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