Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle (review)

Author Gregg Andrews establishes beyond a doubt that the subject of his brisk biography, civil rights and labor activist Thyra Edwards, lived a fascinating and often thrilling life. In a mere 184 pages of narrative, Andrews whisks us through Edwards's childhood in Houston's hardscrabble Third Ward, her careers as a public school teacher in Jim Crow Texas, a social worker in Chicago, and a globetrotting journalist and union organizer whose work took her to Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Spain during the 1936-39 Civil War, and to resettlement camps for Spanish refugees in Mexico. A clandestine lover of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Edwards eventually befriended virtually every important figure in African American arts and politics active in the first half of the twentieth century—singers Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson; writers Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes; the painter Aaron Douglass; and newspaper publishers like Carter Wesley.

Edwards sympathized with the Communist Party USA, which brought her the unwanted attention of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI in the 1940s and 1950s. She engaged in battles with conservative blacks who supported "company unions," helped forge the American "Popular Front" coalition of liberals and leftists who backed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and even flirted with black nationalism and Marcus Garvey's racial separatism.

Such a rich, protean personality deserves a book at least twice this length, which is why this often well-written volume can be so frustrating. Given the number of ideas, great events, and notable figures that cram the book's few pages, Andrews too often bogs down in minutiae. Much of the book reads like a travelogue, with lengthy descriptions of whom Edwards met, where she and her companions dined, what they ate, and what shows and works of art they saw. Readers are told repeatedly that Edwards was a "snappy" dresser, and we get a whole paragraph on page 167 on Edwards's advice on how to style black hair. Such details would provide depth, perhaps, in a longer study, but here they clutter a story in which more important issues are underdeveloped. Texas historians, for instance, might have wished Andrews had explored at greater length how experiments in biracial unionism by the Houston International Longshoremen's Association influenced Edwards's approach to labor organizing and her insistence on African American leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. Andrews alludes to the debate over "the long civil rights movement," the argument advanced by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall and others that the Civil Rights Movement predates and continues after its "classic period" from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education to the 1963 March on Washington, but he does not really engage in the discussion.

Repeatedly, we are told that Edwards was a compelling writer, and the passages that Andrews quotes support that assertion. In one article that particularly resonates in today's debates about the social safety net, Edwards refutes those who argue that welfare promotes dependency. "Instead of the too ready indictment of the unemployed, condemnation should . . . be directed against the political economy that creates these conditions of mass unemployment and its attendant malnutrition, disease, overcrowding . . . and family disintegration." The readers might want more direct quotations from Edwards perhaps to explain why this Marxist, like so many in the 1930s, supported the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact even though some of her German friends had been imprisoned by the Third Reich, and how she reconciled her belief in class struggle with support of Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944. Andrews has written an intriguing introduction to Thyra Edwards, but he leaves us wanting to know much more.