Frankye Adams-Johnson was born in Pocahontas, Mississippi to a family of sharecroppers. As a teenager in Jackson, Mississippi, she participated in the NAACP, COFO, and SNCC as a youth organizer and was heavily involved in the Jackson civil rights movement in 1963. In 1964, she enrolled at Tougaloo College where she continued to be involved in civil rights demonstrations. After moving to New York in 1967, she co-organized the White Plains branch of the Black Panther Party. Adams-Johnson became a college professor in the 1980s, and returned to Jackson from New York in 1999, where she began work as an adjunct professor at Jackson State University in 1999. She became a full-time professor in 2003 until retiring in 2014.
