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From: "Peter_McCrae" <>
Subject: ADAIR: Christia V Daniels--d;31/12/1989>USA
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:46:54 +0100

ADAIR, CHRISTIA V. DANIELS (1893-1989). Christia Adair, black civil-rights
activist and suffragist, was born on October 22, 1893, in Victoria, Texas,
one of four children of Hardy and Ada (Crosby) Daniels. She attended a small
school in Edna, TX then went to Austin TX with her brother in 1910 to attend
high school at Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson College). She
later went to Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (now Prairie
View A&M University), then taught at Edna and later at Vanderbilt, Texas. In
1918 she married Elbert H. Adair, a brakeman for the Missouri Pacific
Railroad. The couple moved to Kingsville, where Christia Adair started a
Sunday school and joined a biracial group of women opposed to gambling. She
also became one of the few black suffragists in the state. When she
attempted to vote after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, however, she
learned that state law concerning primary elections prevented her.

Hurt that she could still be denied the vote, she began shifting her focus
to racial issues. When presidential candidate Warren G. Harding appeared in
Kingsville in 1920, she had carefully situated several black children close
to Harding, but when he finished speaking he reached over them to shake the
hands of white listeners behind them. "I was offended and insulted and I
made up my mind I wouldn't be a Republican ever," she later recalled. The
Adairs moved in 1925 to Houston, where Mrs. Adair became an early member of
the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People.qv

Elbert Adair died in 1943, and for the next sixteen years Christia Adair
remained active in the NAACP, which she served as executive secretary for
twelve years. The Houston branch brought suit against a local election judge
in Smith v. Allwright for denying the vote to a local black dentist, Dr.
Lonnie Smith.qv The case, argued by NAACP special counsel Thurgood Marshall,
was decided in favor of Smith by the United States Supreme Court in 1944.
Smith was important in the history of civil rights law because it ended the
use of race as a barrier to voting in Texas Democratic primaries (see WHITE
PRIMARY). This and similar NAACP activities made the chapter a target for
its opponents. Bomb threats were not uncommon. Although Christia Adair was
sometimes frightened and told people she kept a gun in her home, she was
remembered by others as unafraid. In 1957 Houston police attempted for three
weeks to locate the chapter's membership list. While the official charge was
barratry-the illegal solicitation of clients by attorneys-Adair believed the
real purpose was to destroy the organization and its advocacy of civil
rights. She testified for five hours in a three-week trial over the
attempted seizure of NAACP records. Two years later, on appeal to the
Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall again won a decision for the organization.
Adair never admitted having membership lists or having member's names. In
1959 the chapter disbanded and she resigned as executive secretary, though
she later helped rebuild the group's rolls to 10,000 members.

She also helped desegregate the Houston Public Library,qv airport, veterans'
hospital, and city buses. Partly as a result of her work, blacks became able
to serve on juries, and the city's newspapers began referring to blacks with
the same titles they used for whites; blacks became able to be hired for
county government jobs. Christia Adair successfully desegregated a
department store's dressing rooms when she insisted on using a room reserved
for white women only. With Frankie Randolph,qv she founded the Harris County
Democrats, an integrated alternative to the county's segregated Democratic
organization. She was precinct judge of the third ward, one of the first
blacks in Houston to serve as a judge. In 1960 a Harris County grand jury
investigated the records of an election in her ward, and the process
embittered her. In 1966 she was one of the first two blacks elected to the
state Democratic committee. In response, the state party refused to seat the
Harris County delegation, then agreed to seat only its two black members.
She refused the offer.

Christia Adair was active in the Methodist Episcopal Church and was the
first black woman elected to its general board. She was chairman of the
Christian Social Concern program at Boynton United Methodist Church and
served on its national board of missions. She was also active in the Texas
Club, part of the National Association of Colored Women's and Girls' Club.
She was one of fifty black women interviewed for an oral history of black
women conducted by the Radcliffe College Schlesinger Library of History of
Women in America, and in 1974 the Houston chapter of the National
Organization for Women honored her for suffrage activism. She worked as a
county clerk of absentee voting when she was well into her eighties. On her
eighty-fourth birthday a county park in Houston was dedicated in her name.
Christia Adair died on December 31, 1989.

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• ADAIR: Christia V Daniels--d;31/12/1989>USA by "Peter_McCrae" <>