Christia Adair

Christia Adair

Christia V. Daniels Adair (October 22, 1893 — December 31, 1989) was an African-American suffragist and civil rights worker based in Texas. There is a mural in Texas about her life, displayed in a county park which is named for her.

Early life and education

Christia V. Daniels was born in 1893 in Victoria, Texas, the daughter of Hardy Daniels and Ada Crosby Daniels. Her father had a hauling business, and her mother was a laundress.[1] She attended Samuel Huston College, and trained to teach at the Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College.[2]

Career

Adair left teaching after she married, and moved to Kingsville, Texas, where she joined a women's group and fought against gambling and for suffrage. She found that she could register to vote, but still could not actually vote, after women's suffrage was officially passed, because of Texas state laws.[3]

She moved to Houston in 1925, and joined the city's chapter of the NAACP.[4] She served the chapter as executive secretary[5] from 1950 to 1959,[6] through the period of the landmark Smith v. Allwright case, and facing bomb threats when she refused to divulge the group's membership rolls to police. Adair worked on desegregation of the Houston Public Library, airport, hospital, and public transit facilities, as well as department store dressing rooms.[6] She was part of the effort to make black Texans eligible to serve on juries, and to be hired for county jobs.[2]

Adair co-founded the Harris County Democrats, an integrated organization, and in 1966 was the first African-American woman elected to the state's Democratic Executive Committee (though she refused her seat on the committee in protest).[7][8] She was also active in the Methodist Episcopal Church from childhood, and was the first woman on the denomination's general board.[2]

Adair was honored during her lifetime, as the namesake of a county park and community center in Houston,[9] which includes a John T. Biggers mural about her life;[10] and in 1984 when she was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame.[11] She also gave an interview to the Black Women Oral History Project at Harvard's Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, in 1977.[12]

Personal life and legacy

Christia Daniels married Elbert H. Adair, a brakeman, in 1918. She was widowed in 1943. Christia Daniels Adair died in 1989, age 96.[2]

Her papers are archived in the collection of the Houston Public Library.[13]

References

  1. ↑ Bernadette Pruitt, The Other Great Migration: The Movement of Rural African Americans to Houston, 1900-1941 (Texas A&M University Press 2013): 176. ISBN 9781603449489
  2. 1 2 3 4 Nancy Baker Jones, "Christia V. Daniels Adair" Handbook of Texas Online (accessed July 4, 2016).
  3. ↑ Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African-American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Indiana University Press 1998): 147-148. ISBN 9780253211767
  4. ↑ O. B. Lloyd Jr. "NAACP Puts Top Witness on Stand" Pampa Daily News (October 18, 1956): 1. via Newspapers.com
  5. ↑ "End is Near in Trial to Oust NAACP" Mexia Daily News (October 17, 1956): 1. via Newspapers.com
  6. 1 2 Linda L. Black, "Female community leaders in Houston, Texas: a study of the education of Ima Hogg and Christia Daniels Adair" (PhD diss., 2008, Texas A&M University): 155.
  7. ↑ "Liberal Demos Refuse to Serve on Committee" Abilene Reporter-News" (September 23, 1966): 31. via Newspapers.com
  8. ↑ Karen Gibson, Texas History for Kids: Lone Star Lives and Legends, with 21 Activities (Chicago Review Press 2015): 104. ISBN 9781613749920
  9. ↑ Christia V. Adair Park, Parks Harris County Precinct One.
  10. ↑ Ollie Jensen Theisen, Walls that Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers (University of North Texas Press 2010): 64. ISBN 9781574412895
  11. ↑ Christia V. Daniels Adair, Texas Women's Hall of Fame (2014).
  12. ↑ Black Women Oral History Project. Interviews, 1976-1981. . OH-31. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.
  13. ↑ Christia Adair Collection, MSS.0017, An Inventory of her Records at the African American Library at the Gregory School, Houston Public Library.
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