Edwards Family Empowerment

Lela Houston This subject is very close and dear to me because this is the person who raised me and my brother like she was our mom. After my mom and dad got A divorce, I was around 5 years old, and to be honest it was not a good place for any child to be. Needless to say, things were tough for us.  We stayed with our mom from time to time, but she was never really stable.  We often never stayed in any place longer than a few months. My sister, Sand, helped to watch over us along with her son while we stayed in Matthew Lane.  For the most part, those were good days, even though we got by on the bare minimum, but I was a child who kept company with myself. My imagination just blossomed in those harvested fields that surrounded our home. I don’t know why exactly, but my dad took us to A’ Lela’s house.  We would go there often to visit, but never stayed more than a few hours at a time, then one day we packed our clothes and was told that we would be staying with A’ Le...

Thomas Edwards – The Uncle I Knew Thomas Edwards was born to Napoleon and Mattie Edwards in 1914. He was the youngest of thirteen children. The time Thomas grew up in was nothing like the 60’s or even now. He grew up during the height of the Ku Klux Klan, when lynching was a common thing. It is hard to imagine being a poor black boy in a family of sharecroppers in Perry County, Alabama. This was the world of Thomas Edwards, a poor, smart young man with a great sense of humor in which one would need to endure the toil and outright prejudice of that day. Those early years taught Thomas the importance of family because he understood that it was family that got him through those rough days of Jim Crow and the Great Depression. Thomas indeed survived those trials but he went one better coming out of it he was instill with a strong sense of independence that was based on a strong family unit and that idea he had so long ago is what paved a way that we now are trying to keep open today.  ...

Both in the past and the present, harmonious voices sang lyrics of pain, fear, and hope to call out injustices and discrimination. During the Civil Rights Movement, tears and blood were shed at the hands of oppressors who denied the fact that Black people deserved to have the same rights as them. To not only sit at the front of the bus comfortably, be taught in the best schools, vote proudly, live freely in the skin they’re in, be treated as a human being, but to also love wholeheartedly without fear or judgment.  Indiana and Napoleon Edwards were an impoverished black couple from the early 1900s. They faced many difficulties because of the color of their skin. They were like night and day not only in temperament but in skin color as well. Indiana was a dark-skinned woman and Napoleon was the son of a white man and a black woman, a mulatto. Indiana was originally from Autauga County, Alabama, while Napoleon was originally from Perry County, Alabama. They met. They fell in love. Tog...