Bishop John Hurst Adams, DD

Bishop John Hurst Adams

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/187914473/john_hurst_adams

Minister, educator and civil rights leader. 87th Elected & Consecrated Bishop of The African Methodist Episcopal Church. A nationwide religious, civil rights leader, a contemporary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Adams was a known figure at many MLK-led marches.) and a “spiritual father” to countless believers.

Throughout his career, he was recognized for his eloquence, his independent and critical thinking, his strong administrative skill, his commitment to the A.M.E. Church and to the African American community. He stood out in the A.M.E. Church and among activists in the nation’s fight for racial justice. In 1972, Adams was elected as a bishop in the church and he proceeded to preside over five separate Episcopal Districts that included the Tenth District that covers the entire state of Texas in the 1970s and the Second Episcopal District that covers the Washington and Baltimore areas from 1980-1988 and his home district of South Carolina from 1992-2000. He became a senior bishop of the AME Church in 1988 and retired in 2005.

He was among those who fought for South Carolina to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's. birthday as a state holiday. (South Carolina was the last state in the nation to do so.) Beyond his religious and political pulpits, Adams’ career included serving as president of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Texas, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta. He served on the Board of trustees of Allen University in Pennsylvania, Edward Waters College in Florida, and Morris Brown College.

He was the founder of the Congress of National Black Churches, Inc., in 1978, which coordinated black churches of all denominations from around the country. He was active with the Joint Center on Political and Economic Studies, TransAfrica, and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity. He was a recipient of 9 Honorary Doctorates and numerous leadership awards. Adams passed away at 90 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hurst_Adams

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bishop
John Hurst Adams
Born November 27, 1927
Died January 10, 2018 (aged 90)
Nationality American
Education
Johnson C. Smith University, BA
Boston University School of Theology, MA
Occupation Pastor
Years active 1956-2005
John Hurst Adams (November 27, 1927 - January 10, 2018) was an American civil rights activist and Bishop in 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.[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]

Career
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 Seventh 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]

Later life and death
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 Portland Trail Blazers.[4]