Ina Michele Resnikoff
This is the first of eight profiles about outstanding men and women of Swampscott. I hope you will enjoy reading them. Next year, we’ll do it again but have you, the readers, nominate the residents.
Ralph Edwards is an icon of social justice. He grew up in the deep South during the time of the Civil Rights Movement. “I grew up under apartheid!”
Segregation was thoroughly and brutally enforced. Edwards came from a close, loving and large extended family. He was raised in the house where his mother, Lois, was born. Her mother, Eliza (MaMa) lived there as did his Uncle Ralph. Others uncles and aunts lived nearby and cousins were raised as siblings, and they remain brothers and sisters to this day.