Thyra J. Edwards by Gregg Andrews

Author:Gregg Andrews [Andrews, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826272416
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: 2011-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

8

With Health Problems and Spanish Loyalist Refugees in Mexico

By the summer of 1939, Edwards, disturbed by the Spanish Loyalists’ defeat and the outbreak of war in Europe, was facing ever-worsening health problems. The relentless pace of her political activities on behalf of Republican Spain had exhausted her, and to make matters worse, the Popular Front was dead as an official strategy of the Soviet Union. Because of internal tensions between socialists, liberals, and Communists in the National Negro Congress, Edwards’s relationship with A. Philip Randolph had become strained. As a result, she planned to go to Mexico in late summer to get rejuvenated, reevaluate her personal life, write an autobiography, and gather material for articles on Loyalist refugees. At this stage of her life, she hoped to carve out a career as a writer.

Shortly before Edwards’s fortieth birthday, December 25, 1937, she had been on a speaking tour when she suffered strange, crippling sensations of pain, dizziness, and paralysis. Dazed and frightened, she could barely lift her limbs. “My feet were weights, my legs collapsible, my head crowned the spinal column in pain and unease,” she remembered. “Sleep translated itself into a procession of nightmares: I was sucked into a vortex; my skull was being scraped raw and my arms lay paralyzed.”1

Edwards had kept her physical problems a secret on the trip. “In this condition I toured a good half of the United States,” she recalled, “confiding to no one that I felt my physical equilibrium crumbling under me.” Once she got back to Chicago, she underwent a series of tests and X-rays at a private clinic but was told by doctors that there was nothing seriously wrong with her—just a little inflammation of the appendix, congestion in her bronchial tubes, and “the usual neurasthenic symptoms of an unmarried woman approaching middle age.” As Edwards explained, the conditions amounted to “an aggregate of symptoms totaling up to mere nuisance value.”2

Reassured by the doctors’ report, Edwards had resumed her political activism, even though she suffered crippling attacks periodically. On July 28, 1939, she escorted Franz Karl Weiskopf, a Czech exile, writer, and publisher of an antifascist newspaper in Prague who had recently fled to New York via Paris, to a meeting of student activists affiliated with the American Student Union (ASU). The ASU operated five summer leadership institute groups, one of which was at Locust Farm, where Edwards and Weiskopf spoke. In fact, the Locust Farm group named their working unit the Thyra Edwards Group to honor her activism, inspiration, and efforts on behalf of racial unity. At the meeting on July 28, Edwards and Weiskopf spoke on the topic of culture in the progressive movement. Edwards urged the ASU to examine the political implications of art and culture in order to assess art’s overall aesthetic value.3

Edwards pressed ahead with plans to spend six months in Mexico as a freelance writer to cover the resettlement of Spanish refugees there and to write an autobiography. On August 1, 1939, she packed her bags, grabbed her typewriter, camera, and recorder, and dashed to the train station.

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