William James Edwards (1869-1950) was born in Snow Hill, Alabama, the son of former slaves. Aged 20, he walked 100 miles from his home to the Tuskegee Institute, where he graduated in 1893. He became a prominent educator, founded the Snow Hill Institute and was its principal for 31 years. In his autobiography, Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt (1918), Edwards describes his childhood battles with poverty and illness, and discusses social and economic problems in the South, and the challenges African Americans faced in the early twentieth century.