June 8, 2010 - Courier-Journal

by CARLA F. WALLACE

With the passing of George Edwards, the peace and justice movement in Louisville has lost one of its most persistent, consistent, and fiercely love-motivated voices for a better world.

I was six when I first heard George speak, at a gathering against the Vietnam War outside the old federal building on Broadway. And what a voice it was. For over half a century, when it came to war, exploitation, Occupation, discrimination, inequity -- each and every one of the various hypocrisies of U.S. democracy -- his booming bass of a preacher's voice was never silent.

And in the early '80s, when there were very few who would stand up for rights of one of Louisville's most despised minorities, where some would brandish "God Hates Gays" signs at City Hall rallies, the Rev. George Edwards was a first in what would take decades to become a community of straight-but-not-narrows who support equality for all.

George was a justice teacher and a peace preacher. He was a conscientious objector, and war tax resister, a human rights advocate, a challenger of police abuse, and a marcher for equality for all. He believed in working, writing, speaking, and loving us towards an America that would not plunder the nations of the world and wage wars that savage their people and our own. An America that did not, as Martin Luther King, Jr. stated, spend more on weapons of destruction than on tools of moral uplift. An America where all people are treated with dignity and protected from discrimination, and where none face abuse by those more powerful.

Indeed, George believed in an America that continues to elude us: an improbable, but absolutely necessary America that can only be achieved if we work for it. We can, cradled ever in the example of George's gift of himself, to all of us.