[3] After graduating with his master's degree, Edwards began his career teaching at a number of institutions, all of them historically Black colleges and universities.
After not being admitted to schools in the South due to racial segregation, in 1948 he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, and completed his PhD in physics in 1951.
[6] Among his physics students at North Carolina A&T were retired major general and member of the Greensboro Four, Joseph McNeil; civil rights activist and another member of the Greensboro Four, David Richmond; and NASA astronaut and physicist Ronald McNair, who was the second African American person to go to space and who was killed in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy.
McNair frequently credited Edwards for encouraging him to pursue a PhD in physics, and for his support in the astronaut selection process.
[2][7] In the spring of 1972, an events banquet organized by prominent African-American physicists was formed, and took the title Day of Scientific Lectures and Seminars (DOSLAS).
Their first meeting was held in December 1972 at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, to honor Edwards, Dr. John McNeile Hunter, and Dr. Halson V. Eagleson.
[5] In 2020, the American Physical Society designated Morgan State University, in Baltimore, Maryland, where the first official meetings of the NSBP were held, as a new historic site.