Harry Edwards was born in St. Louis, Illinois.  After an outstanding career at East St. Louis High, he graduated in 1960 and was awarded an athletic scholarship to San Jose State University, where he was a three-year starter on the basketball team and a star discus athlete with the track and field team. He graduated in 1964 with high honors and subsequently was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a University Fellowship to Cornell University where he completed an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology.

Dr. Edwards has a long and storied history of activism focused upon developments at the interface of sport, race, and society. He ultimately called for a Black athlete boycott of the United States 1968 Olympic team in large part to dramatize the racial inequities and barriers confronting Blacks in sport and society. The movement resulted in demonstrations by Black athletes across the nation and ultimately at the Mexico City games – a movement commemorated by a 24-foot high statue on the campus at San Jose State University.

Years later, Dr. Edwards was to become a consultant on issues of diversity for all three major sports.  He was hired by the Commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1987 to help with efforts to increase front office representation of minorities and women in baseball.  He also was with the Golden State Warriors of the NBA from 1987 through 1995, specializing in player personnel recruitment and counseling.  In 1986, he began work with the San Francisco 49ers in the area of player personnel counseling and programs.  The programs and methods that he developed for handling player personnel issues were adopted by the entire NFL in 1992, as was the Minority Coaches’ Internship Program he developed with Coach Bill Walsh to increase opportunities for minority coaches in the NFL.

Edwards is now considered the leading authority on developments at the interface of race, sport, and society and was a pioneering scholar in the founding of the sociology of sport as an academic discipline. He has also been a faculty member at California at Berkeley, an inmate counselor at San Francisco County Jail, and was the Director of the Department of Parks and Recreation for the City of Oakland, California. He is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at California at Berkeley.