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88 6 Conducting Educational Travel Seminars to Europe Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 underscored the importance of the Popular Front to check the spread of fascism. The grave threat to world peace posed by Hitler and Mussolini reinforced Edwards’s determination to link civil rights at home to the struggles against imperialism, theories of racial supremacy, and fascism in Europe. As she had suggested in her eulogy of Jane Addams, the rise of fascism posed a threat to world peace for which pacifism had no solution. Without a radical social restructuring to get rid of exploitation and poverty, the use of force might be necessary to defend the world against those who sought to spread racial hatred and fascist institutions through conquest. To broaden the perspective of African Americans on international affairs, Edwards initiated educational travel seminars overseas. She planned summer tours abroad to educate participants on the serious economic and political problems confronting the world. In particular, she set out to make clear what was at stake for African Americans in the hate-filled political machinations of fascist dictators. She hoped to promote peace, Popular Front coalitions, wom-  Conducting Educational Travel Seminars to Europe 89 en’s trade unions, and the National Negro Congress overseas, just like she had done in Chicago. On December 17, 1935, Edwards began to recruit for the first of her educational summer seminars. She planned it to coincide with the Third International Conference of Social Workers in London scheduled for July 12–18, 1936. She was offering an eight-week seminar at a cost of $525 per person that would consist of a week each in England, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the Soviet Union, and France, with two weeks in transit and return via Paris. The seminar would not only educate the participants but also underwrite Edwards’s overseas political activities as a social worker and writer.1 Edwards planned to retrace the steps that had taken her to the International People’s College in Denmark in 1933–1934 with her seminar participants. The emphasis would be on showcasing class-based cooperative institutions and public-housing initiatives. In England, for example, she planned to take seminar participants to visit housing experiments, the Ruskin Workers’ School at Oxford University, and a cooperative school at Manchester. The seminar’s focus in the Scandinavian countries would be on folk schools, land reform, consumers ’ and producers’ cooperatives, and public-housing innovations. In the Soviet Union, Edwards planned trips to Kiev, Moscow, Kharkov, and Leningrad, where members of the seminar would visit collective farms, factories, and museums and attend the Bolshoi and Children’s Theatre.2 An interracial group of twenty-three seminar enrollees sailed with Edwards from New York on July 3, 1936. Most were teachers and social workers, and most were from Chicago, including A. L. Foster, of the Urban League, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, a physician and health columnist,Viola Neely, assistant district supervisor of the Cook County Bureau of Public Welfare, Margaret Kirkland, a teacher, and Imogene Rousseau, a social worker. Pauline Lubin, a friend of Edwards’s from Houston who was a librarian and representative of the Texas Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, also was part of the group.3 A number of friends came down to the dock that morning to see Edwards off. She was there early to count heads for a scheduled noon departure. Richard Barthé, her friend the Harlem Renaissance sculptor, brought her flowers. So, too, did Agnes Burns Wieck, with whom Edwards had worked in the coalmining struggles in southern Illinois. She gave Edwards a bouquet of roses and letters of introduction to European women whom Edwards intended to interview for a new magazine, the Woman Today. Both Edwards and Wieck were on the advisory board of the magazine, an antifascist publication devoted to women’s rights, the organization of women into trade unions, and international peace. At that time Wieck was working with the American League against War and Fascism and lobbying for minimum-wage laws for women in the workforce.4 90 Thyra J. Edwards Edwards designed a rigorous routine for the seminar at a time of increasing travel by African Americans to Scandinavian countries and the Soviet Union. Some members of the seminar complained about the regimentation, but Edwards was determined to uphold the educational value of the seminar as she drew on her previous experiences, training, and readings. She gave lectures on the...

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