Samuel Clifford Adams, Jr.

Image of Samuel C. Adams, Jr. from Black Past, blackpast.org

Sociologist, Ambassador, Folklorist

Samuel Clifford Adams, Jr.

(1920-2001)

Samuel C. Adams, Jr. was born in Waco, Texas in 1920 to Samuel Clifford Adams, a laborer, and Sarah Catherine Roberts Adams, a schoolteacher. He grew up in the historic Freedman’s town in Brazos Bottoms of the fourth ward of Houston, Texas, and he graduated as class valedictorian at Booker T. Washington High School in 1936. With a scholarship in hand, he planned to study music at Fisk University. However,  Charles S. Johnson, then president of Fisk University, convinced him to change his major to sociology. Johnson’s mentor from the University of Chicago, Robert E. Park, had  moved down to Nashville in his retirement to nurture Fisk students. Park challenged and inspired Adams to examine his own family’s class experiences as African Americans with ties to the cotton plantation culture and to bring those insights into his scholarship.

Adams earned both a B.A. (1938) and M.A. (1947) in sociology from Fisk University. As a graduate student working on his Master’s degree, Adams, and another graduate student, Ulysses S. Young, joined Fisk’s research team conducting fieldwork during the Fisk University-Library of Congress study of Coahoma County in the Mississippi Delta in the early 1940s. Conceived of and led by John Work III, Charles S. Johnson, and  Lewis Wade Jones, this study sought initially to document the cultural practices and traditions of Black communities within the county. Adams and Young, supervised by Jones, surveyed rural and urban Black communities, and researched the impact of changes to cultural and religious practices brought about by the county’s cotton plantation mechanization. Adams wrote significant portions of the Coahoma study, and he submitted a portion of his research as his M.A. thesis in 1947.  It was published posthumously as a section of the Coahoma study in 2005.

The U.S. entry into World War II interrupted Adams’s doctoral studies in sociology at the University of Chicago.  During the war, Adams worked for the military as a civilian in the Norfolk Navy Yard, facing substantial discrimination.  He then transferred to working as a chaplain’s assistant for the Army Air Corps, where he earned the Meritorious Service Award in 1946. In 1952, Adams joined the Economic Cooperation Administration (predecessor to USAID) and began an illustrious career in international affairs through his public service in Southeast Asia. He also earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1953. Recognized for his public service in government in the late 1950s, he became an Education Advisor for USAID in Mali, and was assigned to Cameroon and Ivory Coast. In the 1960s, Adams served as Director for USAID in Morocco, and U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Niger.  His final work post was as Director of the African Bureau of USAID in Washington, D.C., in the 1970s.  

Adams’ contributions to folklore studies can be found in: 

  • Work III, John, Lewis Wade Jones and Samuel C. Adams. 2005. Lost Delta Found: Recovering the Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County Study. Nashville:  Vanderbilt University Press. 
  • “Changing Negro Life in the Delta” (Nashville: M.A. Thesis, Fisk University, 1947).

Select Secondary  Resources:  

Phyllis M. May-Machunda

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