Co-founder with Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the 1960s. The party was formed in the belief that the Democratic Party in Mississippi didn’t welcome Black participation. Gray Adams’s activist past includes her status as the first woman to run for the U.S. Senate when, as the MFDP candidate, she unsuccessfully contested the seat of John Stennis. She was a member of the board of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a national MFDP delegate to the Democratic Party’s national convention in 1964.