Adams was born in Wellington in 1928.[1] Her parents were both involved in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AMEC).[1] She started her education in Wellington and then moved on to the Athlone Training College in Paarl.[1] She became a qualified teacher by age 17.[1] Because the AMEC didn't fight apartheid, she left the church and became more political.[1]
Adams worked as a teacher and was involved in several groups, including the Teacher's League of South Africa (TLSA), Non European Unity Movement (NEUM) and the National Liberation Front (NLF).[1] In September 1963, she was arrested while teaching at Pauw Gedenk primary school.[2] Her students watched as she was taken by police and put into a police van.[2] She was then detained in Maitland under the General Law Amendment Act, 1963 which allowed the police to detain people without a warrant for 90 days.[2][3] In jail, she was the prisoner Albie Sachs describes in The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966) whistling the "Going Home" theme from the New World Symphony by Antonín Dvořák.[2][3] Adams was released in November 1963, but she refused to testify against any members of the TLSA.[2] Again, Adams was arrested. She was eventually banned for five years in August 1964.[2] Even after the ban ended, the Security Branch continued to surveil her movements and activities.[1] During her banning, she had trouble working and when it ended, she was threatened with another banning order.[1]
The Quakers helped her flee South Africa and settle in the United Kingdom where she gained citizenship in 1976.[1] In London, she continued to work for the Quakers and got to know Dora Taylor and Isaac Bangani Tabata.[1] In 1986, she married a peace campaigner, Frank Williams.[1] Adams was reunited with Sachs in London in 1988.[4] Adams started working at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and also with Sachs on post-apartheid issues.[1] Sachs and Adams worked together for 3 years on research towards a new constitution for South Africa.[1]
In 1991, Adams and her husband moved back to South Africa where she worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the University of Western Cape.[1][2] She and her husband moved back to Wellington in 1999 and were the "first mixed-race couple to live on the street that once marked the divide between white and non-white Wellingtonians."[1] Her husband died in 2006 and Adams passed away in a nursing home in May 2011.[1]