In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

54 4 Chain Smoking and Thinking “Black” from Red Square to Nazi Germany Between April and August 1934, Edwards further immersed herself in international affairs through additional travels and independent field investigations in Sweden, Finland, the Soviet Union, Poland, Germany, Austria, and France. She did not leave Elsinore, Denmark, until April 9, but nothing could stop her from reaching Moscow in time for the May 1st festivities in Red Square. She planned to study the role of women and racial minorities in the Soviet Union. Like many African Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union, she came away impressed by the absence of racial prejudice against her there. As a lecturer and freelance journalist with her typewriter at all times, she described her experiences in stories submitted to the Associated Negro Press and other newspapers and journals. Her resourcefulness, experiences, lectures, and writings added to her growing stature as an urbane black intellectual with a sophisticated understanding of world issues. After leaving Elsinore, Edwards spent about three weeks in Sweden. The first stop was in Trollhattan, located in beautiful mountain country known for its waterfalls. For a couple of days, she was a guest in the home of a newspaper edi-  Chain Smoking and Thinking “Black” 55 tor. She visited the town’s big electric plant and enjoyed long hikes before taking a train to Ludvika.1 With a letter of introduction from John Barton, of the International People’s College, Edwards was a guest of the Brunnsvik Workers School in Ludvika. The director was Alf Ahlberg, a social psychology scholar whose textbooks were used widely in Scandinavian countries.2 Edwards described the picturesque location of the school, which “hangs on a high cliff overlooking a great lake and ranges of snow-tipped cliffs, fir forests and frozen lakes as far as you can see.”3 She bedded down in a poets’ cottage, where 125 students and faculty enjoyed a cozy setting that inspired camaraderie and intimacy. The experience absolutely thrilled her: “Evenings before a quaint old peasant fireplace, guitar, singing, long talks, long walks thro the frozen forests. All like a fairy dream.”As she later told Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, in Chicago,“You have never heard anything like the singing of those students, mostly men. At once beautiful, terrible and thrilling. My but I was happy there.”4 Edwards found romance quickly in such a setting. In the room next to hers lived a young Swedish philosopher and teacher of languages, a“very handsome, dark Italian type” who also played the guitar and sang. On one of her first afternoons at the school, he took her for a “promenade.” First, he led her up the highway for awhile and then up into a grove of white birch trees to see an iron mine that had been closed due to the Great Depression. Edwards saw the mine in terms of the suffering that its closure inflicted on workers in the area, but for her new friend,“mines were a rather rude searing of the bosom of the earth.”5 Edwards and her friend climbed higher in the pines through deep snow drifts until they found two dry, flat stones. Invigorated by the walk and intellectual companionship, they sat down on the stones for a very intimate conversation. They talked “of men and women, of sex, of children, of marriage, of the philosophy of Bertrand and Dora Russell and of those who preach sexual liberty but carefully adhere to orthodoxy.”6 The subject turned especially to conventional sexual morality and monogamous relationships. “We were agreed,” Edwards confided to her friend Etha Bell Rogers in the United States, “that one must have a super sense of physical security and sureness in his partner to condone outside relations. But then we agreed that with so strong and vital a union between two persons there would be little occassion [sic] for outside affairs. And so, dialectically, we disposed of sexual freedom as distinguished from tolerance or from free love.”7 For the rest of Edwards’s stay in Ludvika, she and her Swedish lover grew closer as they visited workers’ halls, went for coffee, discussed news and philosophy , and shared poetry. After dinner one night, her companion and Dr. Lindgren , an international relations teacher at the school, invited her to join them for coffee at a country road house about two miles from campus. After a long 56 Thyra J. Edwards political and intellectual discussion, her lover, tired of...

Share