John Hurst Adams

John Hurst Adams (November 27, 1927 - January 10, 2018) was an American civil rights activist and Bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He also served as a college president.

Early life and education Adams was born on November 27, 1927, in Columbia, South Carolina. His father, Eugene Adams, was a reverend in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and a civil rights activist active in Columbia's Black community. 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. Seattle City Council ultimately recommended the policy be voted on by the people, where it lost by a two-to-one margin.

Beginning in 1963, Adams committed to desegregating Seattle Public Schools, attending every Seattle School Board meeting to talk about the de facto segregation of Seattle schools and how Brown v. Board of Education prohibited this. Frances Owen, past head of the school board, was not sure how Adams changed their minds, but attributed their eventual decision in favor of integration to Adams wearing them down and convincing them that something had to change. CAMP aimed at providing support services, job training, and university recruitment options. It hired and trained hundreds of unemployed people to remodel old homes in the Central District. By 2013, then named Centerstone, it had become the oldest independent organization created for the war on poverty. While there, Adams returned to Paul Quinn College to serve as the chairman of the board of trustees. In 1980 Adams became Bishop of the Second Episcopal District in Washington, D.C. The organization had a collective membership of seventeen million members across seven denominations. In D.C. he renewed his activism, protesting Ronald Reagan's military budget and organizing voter registration drives across the country. thumb Adams (left) praying with Bill Clinton in 1996In 1988 he began serving as Bishop for the Sixth Episcopal District, in Georgia. 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. In 1992 Adams was named Bishop of the Seventh Episcopal District in South Carolina. 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. 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. On the subject of the flag, Adams said that it "says the same thing to me that the swastika says to my Jewish brothers." 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. Adams continued his activism through the end of his of time in South Carolina.

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