Sorority Mourns Loss of Honorary Member Cecelia Nabrit Adkins
Leader, activist and pioneer broke many barriers
Alpha Kappa Alpha’s worldwide network of 200,000 members is mourning the loss of Honorary Member and gender/race-barrier breaker Cecelia Nabrit Adkins.
Adkins, the first woman in the United States to head a religious publishing company, died at her home after a long illness December 30, 2006. She was 83.
“We are deeply saddened by loss of Honorary Soror Cecelia Nabrit Adkins. She was a great woman who devoted the best years of her life breaking barriers so that others to follow might have limitless opportunities,” said AKA’s International President Barbara A. McKinzie. “Like our organization’s great founders, Soror Adkins exhibited true strength and courage and reflected the best in Alpha Kappa Alpha’s character. On behalf of our entire membership, we mourn her loss and offer our deepest condolences to her family.”
In a career that spanned 53 years, the Fisk University graduate worked her way up from junior accountant to executive director of the Sunday School Publishing Board of the National Baptist Convention in 1975. She attributed her success in the then male-dominated world of Christian publishing to competence, toughness and “thinking like a man.”
Adkins achieved a string of other notable firsts, including becoming the first African-American woman to be appointed to the Metro Nashville Board of Education, the first woman to serve on the Board of Directors of the Nashville Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the first woman and African American to serve as head of the Protestant Church-owned Publishers Association as well as the first woman to serve as chairman of the board of her alma mater, Fisk University.