Real Housewives of Potomac (RHOP) star Gizelle Bryant announced on Friday that her father Curtis Graves died at the age of 84. Bryant shared the news on Instagram, posting a photo of them along with her three daughters Adore, Angel, and Grace Bryant, writing “Thank you for being the best Dad that a little girl could ever want or need. I will miss you everyday of my life ❤️.”
Bryant has spoken out about her father’s impressive life and work, saying “My dad was very involved with the Civil Rights movement years ago in Houston. For my daughters, this is third generation. My dad was working 60 years ago and he worked with Martin Luther King. For me, my second job out of college was working for the national headquarters of the NAACP and now it’s my daughters.”
Indeed, Graves grew up living and breathing civil rights. He was the great-great-grandson of enslaved Black women and white slave owners on both his mother’s and father’s side. His father was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and as he once told Texas Monthly, “Thurgood Marshall slept in my bed while I slept on the couch—that’s a fact!”
Despite being raised in the Jim Crow South, his parents attempted to shield him “from the harsh realities of segregation,” as much as they could. Graves recounted how his mother “told her son that they sat in the back of the bus because it was cooler, or sat upstairs at the theater to see better, or avoided meals at department stores because the glasses weren’t clean.”
But the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. While Graves was studying at Texas Southern University (TSU), “he became involved in the budding civil rights movement, making the acquaintance of Eldrewey Stearns, a law student and accomplished debater, and Earl Allen, a fellow undergraduate.” The three students were organizing sit-ins and protests, fighting for desegregation. Graves and his friends have even been credited with managing to desegregate the city of Houston and avoid violence.
After achieving success in the political sphere as a campaign manager, Graves made the decision to run for a position in the state legislature in 1966. Even though Texas “had not elected an African American to its legislature since the nineteenth century,” Graves was not discouraged from pursuing the seemingly impossible.
Th election in 1966 “was the first to be contested since the passage off the Voting Rights Act a year earlier, and minority voters were energized.” Graves ended up handily winning his race, becoming the Lone Star State’s first Black representative since the 1870s. But he still faced outright hostility and racism.
Graves recalled that “[p]eople would call and say they would castrate my children…I’d get death threats through the mail. Somebody called one night and said, ‘Is this Curtis Graves, the n*****?’ and I said, ‘Yes, it is,’ and he said, ‘N*****, you’re gonna die in ten minutes.’””
Despite the grave threats, Graves persevered and served for six years. He even managed to continue his activism and notably ran a successful campaign desegregating the Austin Club, a popular eating spot for state legislature members. Unfortunately, Graves’ confrontational and firebrand style made him an enemy of the political elite, and after gerrymandering redistributed the districts, Graves’ future political prospects were hindered. He would go on to serve in the National Aeronautics and Space Association (NASA) administration for thirty years.
After he retired in 2003 from his life as a public servant, Graves focused on his passions, photography and music.
In July 2015, Graves was honored for his “distinguished public service career” by the United States Congress, as seen in Season 1 of RHOP. Now-Senator, then a U.S. Representative, Chris Van Hollen said, “On behalf of the people of Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District, and in anticipation of his seventy-seventh birthday on August 26, 2015, I would like to thank Curtis M. Graves for his lifelong career of public service and for his many contributions to our nation,” adding, “I wish him and his family all the best in the years to come.”