Junius Edwards

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Junius Edwards (April 20, 1929 – March 22, 2008) was an African-American writer whose stories in the 1950s and 1960s looked at the civil rights movement and the racism Black people faced in the military and in the American South. He was born in Alexandria, Louisiana. At 18, he joined the U.S. Army and served nine years in Korea and Japan, working with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and the Army Counter Intelligence Corps. After leaving the Army, he used the Montgomery GI Bill to study at the University of Oslo in Norway, where he began writing seriously.

In 1958 he won the Writer’s Digest Short Story Contest for “Liars Don’t Qualify,” about an Army veteran trying to register to vote in the South who is blocked by white registrars. In 1959 he received the Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship for creative writing. He wrote stories such as “Duel with the Clock” and “Mother Dear and Daddy,” and the novel If We Must Die, which re-tells “Liars Don’t Qualify.” The novel uses simple language to show the dehumanization of African Americans, the power of white supremacy in the South during the 1950s, and the violence that Black people could face. The main character is a Korean War veteran who is prevented from registering to vote and is threatened.

In the 1960s Edwards worked in Manhattan as a copywriter and later started his own agency, Junius Edwards Inc., one of the first Black-owned advertising agencies in the city. His work appeared in Civil Rights anthologies. Edwards died on March 22, 2008, in Manhattan.