Background
Junius Edwards was born in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Junius Edwards was born in Alexandria, Louisiana.
His work, which is composed mainly of short fiction, primarily focused on the African-American Civil Rights Movement and on racial problems that African-Americans in the military and in the South had to face. He was part of a larger movement of African-American writers who wrote during the 1950s and 1960s in an effort to gain awareness for the need for the Civil Rights Movement. Its simplicity of language and character does not belie the dehumanization of African Americans.
The entrenched dominance of the southern white power structure during the 1950s.
And the violence that affects the life of any African American perceived as a threat to this structure. The veteran is later beaten and threatened with castration.
Because Edwards was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, and in his twenties during the Korean War, his novel may have resulted from observation or experience. During the 1960s, Edwards worked in New York City as a copywriter for advertising agencies and went on to establish his own agency: Junius Edwards Incorporated., one of the first blackowned agencies to exist in the city.
He has been published in many anthologies of African-American writing and Civil Rights literature, including Calling the Wind (Editor Clarence Major) and Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement (Editor Margaret Earley Whitt), among others
The self-esteem of the main character, a returning Korean War veteran, is contrasted with the white voter registrar, who refuses to allow the veteran to register on the grounds that he lied about being a member of the Army Reserve.