Victoria Gray Adams Civil Rights Leader Is Dead at 79

Victoria Gray Adams Civil Rights Leader Is Dead at 79

George Ballis/Take Stock

Victoria Jackson Gray Adams at the 1964 Democratic convention.

Victoria Jackson Gray Adams, a key figure in the struggle by Mississippi blacks to win their political and civil rights in the 1960’s and the first woman to seek a seat in the United States Senate from her state, died last Saturday in Baltimore. She was 79.

Her death was announced by her son, the Rev. Cecil Conteen Gray of Baltimore.

Forty-two years ago, Mrs. Gray Adams, a teacher, door-to-door saleswoman of Beauty Queen cosmetics and leader of voter education classes from the hamlet of Palmers Crossing, on the edge of Hattiesburg, Miss., decided to take on Senator John C. Stennis, the Mississippi Democrat who at the time had been in the Senate for 16 years.

In July 1964, she announced that she and others from the tiny Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party would challenge the power of the segregationist politicians, like Mr. Stennis, who represented her state. The time had come, she said, to pay attention “to the Negro in Mississippi, who had not even had the leavings from the American political table.”

That decision became a turning point for the civil rights movement and for the Democratic Party, which for most of its history had been profoundly influenced by all-white delegations from the South. From Hattiesburg, the waves of the civil rights movement “swept quietly through the church world into politics,” the author Taylor Branch wrote in “Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65” (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Mrs. Gray Adams was defeated by a ratio of 30 to 1 in the Democratic primary, in part because Mississippi had effectively disenfranchised black voters. But the party she started and led went on to challenge the right of the all-white Mississippi delegation to represent her state at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

“We had women, men, African-Americans, whites,” Mrs. Gray Adams said of the party in a 2004 interview for the Virginia Organizing Project, a grass-roots political group she helped found. “We were going in the face of the Mississippi Democratic Party, which included some of the most powerful members of the U.S. Congress, to demand that we be recognized to have representation at the Democratic National Convention. It was wild.”

Millions of Americans watching on television saw Fannie Lou Hamer, the best known of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s founders, tell the convention’s credentials committee that she had been jailed and beaten for trying to register blacks to vote. “Is this America?” Ms. Hamer asked.

The all-white Mississippi delegation walked out of the convention. It rejected a compromise proposal to give the integrated Freedom Democratic Party token representation on the floor. It was the beginning of the end of an old political tradition. In 1968, Mississippi seated an integrated delegation at the Democratic convention.

“We really were the true Democratic Party,” Mrs. Gray Adams said in the 2004 interview. In the end, she said, “we accomplished the removal of the wall, the curtain of fear in Mississippi for African-Americans demanding their rights.”

She continued: “We eliminated the isolation of the African-Americans from the political process. I believe that Mississippi now has the highest number of African-American elected officials in the nation. We laid the groundwork for that.”

Born on Nov. 5, 1926, in Palmers Crossing, the daughter of Mack and Annie Mae Ott Jackson, Mrs. Gray Adams was educated at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and Jackson State College in Mississippi. She went on to serve as a campus minister at Virginia State University and to teach and lecture at schools, colleges and universities across the nation.

Her first marriage, to Tony Gray, produced three children, Georgie; Tony Jr., who died in 1997; and Cecil, and ended in divorce in 1964. Other survivors include her husband of 40 years, Reuben Earnest Adams Jr.; their son, Reuben III; a brother, Glodies Jackson; and eight grandchildren.

Mrs. Gray Adams said she learned in 1964 that there were two kinds of people in grass-roots politics, “those who are in the movement, and those who have the movement in them.”

“The movement is in me,” she said, “and I know it always will be