Clara Leach Adams-Ender was born in Willow Spring, North Carolina, on July 11, 1939. She had nine siblings. Her mother was named Caretha Bell Sapp Leach. Her father, Otha Leach, was a sharecropper and the family lived in Wake County, North Carolina, on a tobacco farm. Adams-Ender attended high school at Fuquay Springs Consolidated High School and graduated when she was sixteen as second in her class. She went to college at North Carolina A&amp;T State University. While there, she was a participant in the Greensboro sit-ins.