Christia Adair was an elementary school teacher, an American suffragist in her Texas hometown, and a civil rights activist. She took a stand against and brought an end to “Whites Only” primary elections voting practices in Houston, Texas. Adair was born Christia Daniels in Victoria, Texas on October 22, 1893 to parents who received no education. Adair attended Samuel Houston College in Austin, Texas and Prairie View State Normal and Industrial College (Prairie View A&E today), earning a teaching degree in 1914. After graduating, Adair moved to Edna, Texas where she worked as a teacher. In 1918 she married Elbert Adair, afterwards moving to Kingsville where she worked with the White community to end women’s suffrage. Adair soon found out during the early 1920s that Black women were not included in the right to vote. In 1925, Adair moved to Houston and she was one of the establishers of the Houston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and it grew to have 10,000 members. She worked with NAACP for 25 years before her appointment with the organization. From 1943 to 1955 she served as the executive secretary. While serving in this title, Adair was titled Woman of the Year by Zeta Phi Beta Sorority (in 1952) and she founded the Harris County Interracial Political Group for democrats, an anti-segregation division of the local party and the Harris County Council of Organizations which supported Black voting (also in 1952). She advocated a court case over opening the state’s universities to Black students and assisted minorities in fulfilling equal access to city buses, department store dressing rooms, libraries, public schools, the Houston airport, and Veteran Administration hospitals. She retired from the NAACP in 1959 then served as a Precinct 25 judge for 20 years. In 1966, she became one of the first Blacks to be elected to the Democratic Executive Committee as a woman. She was sighted for her suffrage work by the National Organization for Women. In 1977, Adair she was chosen as 1 out of 4 women in the country to partake in the Black Women Oral History Project funded by Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. This same year, a Houston city park was named after her. Her name was added to the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 1984. Adair died on December 31, 1989.

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