Frank Adams, author, journalist, educator, and community organizer, was born May 19, 1934, in Maine, and reared on a farm near Edenton, North Carolina. After attending the University of North Carolina and serving in the Army, Adams worked for the St. Petersburg, Florida, Times (1957-1958) and then for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk (1959-1964). His growing interest in urban problems and planning led him to enroll in Goddard College where he received his B.A. degree in 1965. Modifying his goals to focus on community change, Adams then entered the Antioch-Putney Graduate School of Education and earned his master's degree in 1966. While in school, he held jobs with the Norfolk Department of Public Health, as director of public information at Goddard, with The Journal Herald in Dayton, Ohio, and as an instructor at Goddard. He was also very active in the Plainfield (Vermont) Society of Friends and involved with civil rights, civil liberties, and anti-war activities.
Eager to return to the South, Adams sought the position of state coordinator of the Virginia Council on Human Relations, a non-governmental organization concerned primarily with racial issues. There from 1967 to 1969, he concurrently served as director of the Frederick Douglass Fellowships in Journalism, a program which aimed at training African-Americans for journalism careers.
Adams left Virginia to join the staff of the Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tennessee, an institution committed to social change via education of the poor and powerless. Adams had long been interested in the Center and his first project was to work with its founder, Myles Horton, in writing a history of the Center and its predecessor, the Highlander Folk School. The resulting book was published in 1975 as Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander.
Recurring health problems forced Adams into relative inactivity from spring 1972 through much of 1973. Settling in Gatesville, North Carolina, where his wife taught school, Adams resumed activity gradually--writing, speaking at conferences and in academic settings, working for Highlander on education activities in prison road camps, and helping establish an Assembly self-help program in North Carolina. In July 1974 he attended Walden University, Naples, Florida, where he worked on a dissertation on anarchist education which later earned him a Ph.D. degree. He also learned the cobbler's trade and in the fall of 1975 opened a shoe repair and sandal shop in Gatesville whose main purpose was to provide a setting for encouraging community education and action.
After 1975, Adams turned increasingly to writing and consulting. He travelled and wrote for the syndicated column “Facing South”; published articles in Southern Exposure, Change, and elsewhere; did studies on the media and school desegregation in the South and on Boston school desegregation for the Ford Foundation and on the Reynolds Homestead Learning Center for the Arca Foundation; wrote with Ann Giles Benson a book on Goddard College and its president, Royce (Tim) Pitkin; and wrote a biography of James A. Dombrowski, former executive director of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and of the Southern Conference Educational Fund. He maintained contacts with others devoted to social change in the South and the nation and continued to work closely with Highlander as a member of its board of directors. And through everything else, he kept up his self-described role as someone adept at “stirring things up.”
In 1978, after completing research for his Dombrowski biography and the book on Goddard College (To Know for Real), Adams became increasingly involved with worker cooperatives and work place education. He shifted his writing efforts to projects associated with this work such as reports, grant proposals, and feasibility studies.
His first worker ownership project was the conversion of a rural North Carolina garment manufacturer, Bertie Industries, to the Worker Owned Sewing Cooperative (WOSC). He developed an educational program for the cooperative and also acted as a liaison between WOSC and the Industrial Cooperative Association (ICA), a Boston-based organization providing legal, educational, and financial assistance to worker cooperatives, and Twin Streams, a North Carolina adult education organization. Another project Adams was involved in at this time was a study of options for rural credit unions in Bertie, Chowan, and Gates counties, on which he worked with Rick Carlisle from 1979 to 1981.
In 1980 Adams took a job as community education specialist with Legal Services of the Coastal Plains (LSCP), a law office that supplied legal assistance to low income residents of North Carolina. While working at LSCP, Adams continued to take on independent projects, and he presented papers at numerous conferences related to adult education and acted as editor for an independent North Carolina newspaper, The Peoples' Voice. In 1983 and 1984 he also helped to develop a democratic management program for Guilford College. With his wife Margaret, in 1984 he also started Work Books, a mail order distribution service for books about worker ownership. Adams also continued his involvement with the American Friends Service Committee and was a member of the board of directors of the Highlander Center.
Due to budget cuts in 1984 Adams lost his job at LSCP, and he began supporting himself with various freelance projects such as a cooperative research and development company, a writers' publishing cooperative, and a soft drink bottling co-op. In 1985 he became education specialist for the Industrial Cooperative Association of Boston, Massachusetts, where he continued developing educational programs for worker-owned businesses.
