Died 31 December 1989 | ||
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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.
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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. She attended Samuel Huston College, and trained to teach at the Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College.
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.
She moved to Houston in 1925, and joined the city's chapter of the NAACP. She served the chapter as executive secretary from 1950 to 1959, 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. She was part of the effort to make black Texans eligible to serve on juries, and to be hired for county jobs.
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). She was also active in the Methodist Episcopal Church from childhood, and was the first woman on the denomination's general board.
Adair was honored during her lifetime, as the namesake of a county park and community center in Houston, which includes a John T. Biggers mural about her life; and in 1984 when she was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame. 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.
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.
Her papers are archived in the collection of the Houston Public Library.