John Hurst Adams

Adams was born on November 27, 1927, in Columbia, South Carolina.[1][2] His father, Eugene Adams, was a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a civil rights activist active in Columbia's Black community.[2] Adams attended Booker T. Washington High School, graduating in 1947, and earned a Bachelor's in History from Johnson C. Smith University several years later.[2] Adams completed his postgraduate education at the Boston University School of Theology, where he met Martin Luther King Jr. He also briefly attended Harvard University and Union Theological Seminary.[2]

In 1956, Adams was made president of Paul Quinn College, a position he held for six years.[3] While president of the college, Adams lived in Waco and quickly became a target of the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. Waco was where Adams began his civil rights activism in earnest. He supported students in their protest efforts and engaged in them himself, participating in sit-ins and marching on picket lines.[4] Despite being re-appointed as president, in 1962 he moved to Seattle, accepting a position as lead pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church.[5][2] While serving in that role, Adams acted as chairman of the Central Area Civil Rights Committee, a group dedicated to promoting civil rights in Seattle.[2] In that role, he advocated for an open housing ordinance to ban housing discrimination in the city. Seattle City Council ultimately recommended the policy be voted on by the people, where it lost by a two-to-one margin.[6][7] He also helped found the Central Area Motivation Program, the first government agency explicitly created as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty.[2][8]

In 1968 Adams was transferred to a church in Los Angeles where he served for four years. In 1972, he was named Bishop of the Tenth Episcopal District in Texas.[9][10] While there, Adams returned to Paul Quinn College to serve as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees.[11] In 1980 Adams became Bishop of the Second Episcopal District in Washington, D.C.[2] He founded the Congress of National Black Churches, a coalition of historically African-American denominations, in 1982 and acted as its first chairman.[12] The organization had a collective membership of seventeen million members across seven denominations.[13] In D.C. he renewed his activism, protesting Ronald Reagan's military budget and organizing voter registration drives across the country.[14][15]

Adams (left) praying with Bill Clinton in 1996

In 1988 he began serving as Bishop for the Sixth Episcopal District, in Georgia.[2][16] He was a heavy critic of Ralph Abernathy's 1989 book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, which made controversial claims about Martin Luther King Jr.'s private life.[17][18] In 1992 Adams was named Bishop of the Tenth Episcopal District in South Carolina.[2][19] The following year, he was ranked alongside Jesse Jackson as one of the top Black preachers in the United States by Ebony and advocated against Bill Clinton's endorsement of Chuck Robb in his Senate campaign.[20][21] In 1994, he began speaking out against the South Carolina State House's flying of the Confederate battle flag, working with the NAACP and Christian interdenominational groups to organize a protest at the State House against the flag.[22][23] On the subject of the flag, Adams said that it "says the same thing to me that the swastika says to my Jewish brothers."[24] The group accepted a compromise which would move the flag from the dome of the capitol to a less visible place, however, the compromise did not go into effect.[25] Adams continued his activism through the end of his of time in South Carolina.[26]

Adam's final placement as Bishop was made in 2000, when he transferred to the Eleventh Episcopal District in Florida.[2][27] He retired in 2005 and returned to his hometown of Columbia, South Carolina.[2]

Adams and his wife had three children.[9] After his retirement, Adams became a professor at Emory University.[2] He died on January 10, 2018, in Atlanta.[1] His grandson Malcolm Brogdon is a professional basketball player for the Boston Celtics.[4]

• John Hurst Adams at HistoryLink
• John Hurst Adams papers at the University of South Carolina