She recalls her personal interracial friendships and noticing how their skin-tones were a determining factor in their daily experiences.

Her trip to the Soviet Union was a significant adventure for her and supported her views, like the value of communism to civil rights and sexual liberation.

[2] Edwards traveled in Europe in 1929, and moved to Chicago in 1931, to be a social worker with the Joint Emergency Relief Commission, while living at the Abraham Lincoln Centre, a settlement house.

She soon became active with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a black union based in Chicago, and with the Progressive Miners of America in southern Illinois.

In mid-1930s, she traveled in England, Scandinavia, Austria, Germany, and the Soviet Union,[3] then on the Spain to work with child refugees of the Spanish Civil War.

As head of the women's committee of the National Negro Congress during World War II, she taught about the Soviet Union at the Carver School.

[2] The European Seminar of International Relations traveled to Spain, and the Soviet Union, which was a “safe haven” for black radicalists at the time.

She worked alongside her academic peers, surveying colonies of children who were evacuated and relocated due to the war.

When Edwards returned to America she continued pursuing her organizing work for Spain with the Negro Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy.

[4] During her time traveling in Europe, in 1953, she organized the first Jewish child care program in Rome to assist the children who had fallen victim to the Holocaust.

Thyra Edwards supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and used her role to not only travel to Europe and the Soviet Union, but also to Mexico to further her work.

[9] She wrote from her travels for African-American periodicals, including a 1932 report on a homeless men's shelter in Chicago,[10][11] a 1933 interview with Nigerian lawyer Stella Thomas, whom she described as "tall and black and real and beautiful and poised, and wrapped in flame",[12] and "Negro Literature Comes to Demark", her 1936 report from the International People's School.