Thyra J. Edwards

Thyra Johnson Edwards (December 25, 1897 – July 9, 1953) was an African-American educator, social worker, journalist, labor and civil rights activist, and women's rights activist. Pan-Africanist, and communist.

Early life Thyra Johnson Edwards was born in 1897 in Wharton, Texas, the daughter of Horace Ferdinand Edwards and Anna Bell Johnson Edwards. Her grandparents were runaway slaves who migrated from Missouri to Illinois.

Thyra Edwards graduated from Houston Colored High School in 1915. While in high school, she held close friendships with black and white girls her age. She recalls her personal interracial friendships and noticing how their skin-tones were a determining factor in their daily experiences.

Career Edwards started as a teacher in Texas, right after high school. She became a charter member of the Houston chapter of the NAACP when it formed in 1918. In 1919, she began working for the Houston Social Service Bureau as a family visitor, where she began her work in social work. The next year moved to Gary, Indiana with her sister, Thelma.

She was based in Indiana for the next twelve years, working as a teacher, social worker, and juvenile probation officer, interracial activist, while lecturing and becoming more active in labor and civil rights work. In 1925 she became a child placement specialist with the Lake County Board of Guardians. In 1927 she helped to open the Lake County Children's Home, and she served as its director for three years. She was one of the founders of Gary's Interracial Commission in 1924, and served on the board of the John Stewart Social Settlement Center, a settlement house serving African Americans in Gary. She organized the Business and Professional Women's Club in Gary. She spoke at the National Negro Business League conference in St. Louis, Missouri in 1927. She was vice-president of the Gary Council of Social Agencies, and active in the city's YWCA.

Edwards was a caseworker for the Joint Emergency Relief Commission. In mid-1930s, she traveled in England, Scandinavia, Austria, Germany, and the Soviet Union,

Her social work viewpoint focused on advocating for at-risk populations and predisposed disadvantages, the injustices affecting the well-being of women and working with and uniting diverse populations.

During this time in the history of America, it was believed that black social workers should only help the blacks, but Thyra Edwards helped people of all races, nationalities and ethnicities.

Communist work In the early 1930s, Thyra Edwards traveled to Europe for work in international affairs. Edwards visited Sweden, Finland, Poland, Germany and France. In Paris, Edwards led a travel seminar, The European Seminar of International Relations, an international group of social workers who were involved in European social movements, such as the rise of communism and socialism. She wrote from her travels for African-American periodicals, including a 1932 report on a homeless men's shelter in Chicago, a 1933 interview with Nigerian lawyer Stella Thomas, whom she described as "tall and black and real and beautiful and poised, and wrapped in flame", and "Negro Literature Comes to Demark", her 1936 report from the International People's School. She wrote about the Spanish Civil War in a series of articles for the Chicago Defender. Edwards used these articles to express her support for socialism and her opposition to fascism, saying of the latter ideology that "Fascism degrades women".

Personal life Thyra J. Edwards married steelworker James Malcolm Garnett in 1924; they divorced a year later. She married again, to Murray Gitlin, in 1943. After 1948, they lived in Italy, where he was working with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

In 1946, Edward’s was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. She was then later diagnosed with breast cancer. Thyra Edwards Gitlin died in New York, 1953, aged 55 years, from breast cancer. The Thyra Edwards Papers are archived at the Chicago History Museum. Actor William Marshall was Thyra Edwards' nephew, the son of her sister, Thelma Edwards Marshall.