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179 Epilogue From crawfish ponds in Wharton, Texas, to the bright lights of European capitals and the Kremlin, Edwards’s rebellion against “man’s inhumanity to man” was the driving force behind her global quest for freedom. As a black woman and left-wing activist who negotiated in a white man’s world, she spoke truth to power and contributed significantly to the radical roots of the post1945 civil-rights movement. A popular interpreter of international events to African American audiences, she articulated an anti-imperialist, antifascist, Pan-African critique of world affairs from the perspectives of race, class, and gender. Her labor-based civil-rights activism anticipated the later deepening emphasis by Martin Luther King Jr. on the modern civil-rights movement’s need to address the economic exploitation of black workers in the United States. Her commitments to peace and women’s rights, too, were grounded in an analysis of class relations.1 Edwards had a reputation for doing things her own way. She was fiercely independent and a romantic with an enormous zest for life, intellectual curiosity , and bold sense of adventure. She found warmth in and drew inspiration from the daily struggles of people with whom she shared a sense of camaraderie and purpose. Her political sympathies were with the masses of people struggling against multilayered forms of exploitation. Unlike most of her activist contemporaries, she put her faith in the Communist Party and trade unions as the political instruments of mass mobilization to tear down the walls of racial segregation. For her, though, the struggle went beyond race. The war against Jim Crow and bigotry in the United States was part of a much broader campaign for democracy, human rights, and a world free of poverty and exploitation. 180 Epilogue After investing so much of her energy in left-liberal coalitions before and during World War II, Edwards died during one of the darkest periods in American politics. The promise of the Double V campaign turned to bitter disappointment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the Cold War shredded leftist coalitions. Many white liberals in the CIO, for example, sought shelter from reactionary political forces by turning their backs on civil rights and their former Communist allies. The CIO purged its left-wing unions— the most racially progressive ones, laying the foundation for a reunification of the AFL and CIO under conservative leadership in 1955. Likewise, the NAACP cracked down on political radicals in its ranks, even expelling W. E. B. DuBois. Many of Edwards’s good friends and political allies were jailed, deported, hauled before HUAC, and/or forced to surrender their passports. Because of their Communist affiliations, for example, Ferdinand Smith was deported and Benjamin Davis was sent to prison. A number of other top CPUSA officials spent time in prison for violating the Smith Act. The revocation of blacklisted Captain Hugh Mulzac’s master’s license on account of his pro-labor, proCommunist activities in the National Maritime Union kept him from finding a ship to command after the war. In 1953, the year of Edwards’s death, the McCarthy Committee summoned Langston Hughes to testify about his Communist connections. The State Department revoked the passport of Paul Robeson to bar him from performing overseas. The chill of McCarthyism extended to Italy , too, where U.S. intelligence officials monitored and restricted Edwards’s activities . Officials revoked her passport to prevent her from traveling anywhere outside Italy except back to the United States. Only fifteen years earlier, fascists had thrown some of her European friends into jail. In the final years of her life, she learned in despair that once again some of her friends were jailed for their radical political views, but this time,American authorities held the keys to their prison cells.2 Whether or not Edwards was a Communist is not entirely clear. Unlike Claudia Jones, a Caribbean-born Communist theoretician and fellow leader in the Congress of American Women who was jailed and deported from the United States in 1955,3 for example, Edwards never laid out a clear articulation of her political philosophy. On the one hand, Edwards denied in sworn testimony to the FBI that she was a Communist. It is possible, then, that she simply may have been drawn to cooperation with the CPUSA because of its robust stance and leadership on civil-rights matters. Considering her travel experiences and field investigations in the Soviet Union in the mid- to late 1930s, and given...

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