Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin

Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin was a suffragist, civil rights activist and community organizer.

Born on August 9, 1883, to a working class African American family in Washington, D.C., Lampkin got her start organizing consumer protest groups made up of Black housewives in Pittsburgh. In 1915, she was elected president of the Lucy Stone Woman Suffrage League, a Pittsburgh-based organization dedicated to advocating suffrage for Black women. After representing the League at a conference of the National Association of Colored Women in 1916, Lampkin served as national organizer and chairman of the executive board for the NACW.

Lampkin became more involved in state politics in the 1920s when she served as vice chairman of the Negro Voters League of Pennsylvania. She also served as the alternate delegate-at-large for the Republican national convention and as vice chairman of the Colored Voters’ Division of the Republican National Committee.

Lampkin was also active in the NAACP, expanding their membership and fundraising for them through her capacity as regional field secretary from 1930 to 1935 and then as national field secretary from 1935 to 1947. She is credited with establishing a massive base of NAACP members and activists who would later become the foundation for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s. In 1944, Lampkin was honored by the National Council of Negro Women for her work and was praised by the NAACP Bulletin.

In 1964, Lampkin was the first to receive the NCNW’s Eleanor Roosevelt-Mary McLeod Bethune World Citizenship Award, which was accepted for her by actress Lena Horne. Lampkin suffered a stroke in October 1964 and died in March 1965.

Information taken from:

"Lampkin, Daisy Elizabeth Adams." In Notable American Women: The Modern Period, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, 443-73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.