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Introduction: “The Spirit of Aframerican Womanhood”
- University of Missouri Press
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1 Introduction “The Spirit of Aframerican Womanhood” I assure you that Thyra Edwards is one of the most brilliant young women of the Negro or any other race, in public life today. She has not only a keen analytical mind, but a fine poise, modest charm and a fluency of presentation that will capture the admiration of the most critical. —A. Philip Randolph, quoted in “The National Religion and Labor Foundation Sponsors Thyra J. Edwards,” ca. 1934 Thyra J. Edwards, the granddaughter of runaway slaves, was an important labor , civil-rights, and peace activist and an internationalist, Pan-Africanist, and advocate of women’s rights in the first half of the twentieth century. A Texan who in her early twenties joined the Great Migration to the North, she was among a number of radical black women at that time who put their faith in organized labor and the Communist Party as instruments of civil rights and social justice. She brought not only a “southernness” but also an international dimension to her political activism because of her extensive travels, studies, and associations overseas. For Edwards, the battle for civil rights in the United States was part of the larger struggle against fascism, colonialism, and imperialism in the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. Edwards grew up on the mean Jim Crow streets of Houston, Texas, in the early 1900s. Houston was a city harshly divided along lines of race and class. 2 Thyra J. Edwards In 1917, during the Camp Logan Riot, Edwards saw the city’s streets run red with blood when local police shot down black uniformed soldiers of the United States Army who had rebelled against Jim Crow segregation and harassment by killing or wounding a number of white residents and police officers. The Camp Logan Riot contributed to Edwards’s radicalization, but she had hated oppression from the time she was a child, fighting turf wars in which she and black friends battled gangs of white kids on the streets, block by block. She and other black children on their way to crummy, dilapidated school buildings at times had to dodge muddy holes where sidewalks should have been, even wading through deep water in marshlike conditions just to get to school. Racial hatred and violence, hard times, segregation, oppression, disease, Jim Crow medicine, authoritarianism, and exploitation shaped the southern urban setting in which she came of age.1 Edwards, although at times reminded by her mother that certain things were off-limits to her in the segregated South, refused to accept second-class citizenship in a racist society. Not even the deep sting of a tyrannical father’s razor strap could crush her rebellious spirit as a child. Impulsive and impetuous, with magnificent charm, a restless spirit, and zest for life, she set out on a spiritual quest for freedom that took her around the world. In 1938, a black newspaper in Houston paid a front-page tribute to her as the embodiment of “the spirit of aframerican womanhood.”2 Born in 1897, Edwards was kin to the white, slaveholding family of a former Mississippi governor on her father’s side, although the formerly slaveholding family did not acknowledge the kinship. Her maternal great-grandfather was also a white slaveholder. Edwards’s maternal grandparents’ daring escape from slavery across the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri, provided an important source of inspiration for her activism. Thyra Edwards’s life journey took her from Texas to Gary, Indiana; Chicago ; New York City; and then around the world in a peripatetic search for the roots of oppression. She donned a lot of hats on the journey. As an activist, her friendships, professional associations, romantic relationships, and cultural pursuits often grew out of her political commitments. She was a social worker, labor organizer, teacher, and civil-rights activist, as well as a journalist, managing newspaper editor, fiction writer, and world lecturer. She rejected orthodox religion and conventional marriage. She was a theater critic, passionate lover of the arts, excellent cook, and fashion-conscious beauty writer known for her impeccable taste and collection of peasant blouses. She led educational travel seminars to northern and western Europe, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the Soviet Union. Although Edwards took undergraduate courses and passed comprehensive exams at the University of Chicago, she never finished her college degree.A life of travel and intellectual inquiry through field investigations and personal Introduction 3 experiences meant more to her. Make no mistake, though, she had a brilliant, analytical mind and contributed...