Christia adair biography examples

Bio

The civil rights struggle of the 1950s had a champion in Christia Adair, NAACP leader from Houston. As a young woman in South Texas, she worked for woman suffrage, only to find that black women were still excluded from Texas primary elections.

Christia adair biography examples

She continued to work for full suffrage and was one of the first black women to vote in a Democratic primary after the Supreme Court struck down Texas' white primary law in 1944. As executive secretary of the Houston NAACP for 12 years, she and others desegregated the Houston airport, public libraries, city buses, and department store dressing rooms.

Despite official harassment, Adair and others rebuilt the Houston NAACP chapter, which grew to 10,000 members. In 1977, a Houston city park was named for her.

Audio

Written by Nancy Baker Jones
Read by Teresa Palomo Acosta

Christia Adair was one of the few African American suffragists in Texas, but when she tried to vote in the early 1920s