Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr

Source:

 African American National Biography

Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr

(29 Nov. 1908–4 Apr. 1972),

minister and congressman, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of the Reverend

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., congressman from Harlem, minister, and lifelong warrior for civil rights. (Library of Congress.)

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Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Mattie Fletcher Shaffer. The family moved to New York City in 1909 after the senior Powell became minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, then located at Fortieth Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. In 1923, at the elder Powell's urging, the church and the family joined the surge of black migration uptown to Harlem, with the church moving to 138th Street between Seventh and Lenox avenues.

Adam Powell Jr. earned an AB at Colgate University in 1930 and an AM in Religious Education at Columbia University in 1932. So light-skinned that he could pass for white, and did so for a time at Colgate, he came to identify himself as black, and, although from a comfortable background, he advocated the rights of workers.

Powell's rise to power, and his adoption of various leadership roles in civil rights, dated from the 1930s. His power base throughout his career was the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where his father ministered to his flock's social and economic as well as spiritual needs. There, during the Great Depression, young Powell directed a soup kitchen and relief operation that supplied thousands of destitute Harlemites with food and clothing. In 1930 he became the church's business manager and director of its community center. In 1937 he succeeded his father as pastor. He married the Cotton Club dancer Isabel Washington in 1933 and adopted her son from a previous marriage.

Beginning in 1936 Powell published a column, “The Soap Box,” in the black weekly Amsterdam News. Active in a campaign for equal employment opportunities for black residents of Harlem, his first major social campaign involved efforts to improve blacks' employment opportunities and working conditions at Harlem Hospital. By the mid-1930s, “Don't buy where you can't work” became a slogan in Harlem, as it already had become in Chicago and some other cities. Powell became a leader of organized picketing of offending stores. By 1938 he led the Greater New York Coordinating Committee for Employment, which pushed successfully in the next few years for jobs for blacks not only in stores but also with the electric and telephone companies, as workers at the 1939 New York World's Fair, as drivers and mechanics on city buses, and as faculty at the city's colleges.

During World War II Powell continued proselytizing from old platforms, and he found new ones. He preached at Abyssinian Baptist, which had the largest Protestant congregation in the United States; led the militant Harlem People's Committee; published the People's Voice, a Harlem weekly; and wrote Marching Blacks: An Interpretive History of the Rise of the Black Common Man (1945). Divorcing his first wife, he married the pianist and singer Hazel Scott in 1945, and they had a son. Powell's prominence in Harlem resulted in his election in 1941 to the New York City Council, where he continued to hone his combination of political and protest skills. From this political base he ran for Congress in 1944 when a new congressional district was formed for Harlem. Winning, he became New York City's first black congressman; William L. Dawson of Chicago was the only other African American then in Congress.

For many years an often lonely voice in Congress, Powell called for a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, an end to the poll tax in federal elections, and an end to racial segregation in the military. Finding that House rules banned him because of his race from such facilities as dining rooms, steam baths, and barbershops, he nonetheless proceeded to make use of all such facilities, and he insisted that his staff follow his lead. He brought an end to the exclusion of black journalists from the press gallery in the House of Representatives. As early as the 1940s he was characteristically offering what became known as the “Powell Amendment” to spending legislation. The proviso, supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, would have banned federal funds from any project that supported racial segregation, and though it failed to pass, it made him known as “Mr. Civil Rights.”

A New Deal Democrat, Powell nonetheless maintained political independence, whether from his father or from the Democratic Party's leadership. Charting his own way, though his father remained a Republican, Powell campaigned in 1932 for the Democratic presidential nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1944 he ran for Congress as the nominee of the Republican and American Labor parties as well as the Democratic Party. In 1956 he broke with the Democrats over the party's temporizing stance on civil rights issues to support Dwight Eisenhower's reelection campaign. Throughout his years in Congress he saw his main mission as thwarting the southern wing of his own party in Congress. He demonstrated no patience with liberal Democrats who trimmed sails or pulled punches when civil rights legislation was at stake.

One of Powell's chief roles, often behind the scenes, was to monitor the behavior of organized labor and the federal government on the racial front. He believed apprenticeship programs in the labor market should be open to blacks, progressive legislation should be enacted, and no federal agency should practice or foster racial segregation or discrimination. During the 1960s he tried to ensure that blacks would hold leadership positions in the Peace Corps, the Poverty Corps, and federal regulatory agencies. Ambassadorships, cabinet positions, and the Supreme Court, he urged, should have black representation. His relations with the Eisenhower administration enabled him to arrange in 1954 for the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, while on a visit to the United States, to visit Abyssinian Baptist Church. There the emperor presented Powell with a large gold medallion, which he proudly wore on a chain around his neck for the rest of his life.

Powell divorced his second wife and married Yvette Flores in 1960, and they had a son. As a result of the seniority system in Congress, Powell's peak in power came in the 1960s, the years of the New Frontier and the Great Society. For three terms, from 1961 to 1967, he chaired the House Committee on Education and Labor. From his committee came such landmark legislation as the 1961 Minimum Wage Bill, the Vocational Education Act, the Manpower Development and Training Act, various antipoverty bills, and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. When the National Defense Education Act of 1958, with its promotion of education in science, mathematics, and foreign languages, came up for renewal in 1964, Powell steered through an expansion of coverage to the humanities and social sciences. And when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, Title VI, which authorized all federal agencies to withhold aid from institutions that practiced racial segregation or discrimination, embodied the “Powell Amendment.” His time had come; he pushed ahead to challenge school segregation in the North.

Powell's fall from power came at the height of his national prominence. Always flamboyant and controversial, he displayed moral behavior anything but ascetic, spent tax dollars merrily on pleasure trips, and often missed important votes in Congress. In a television interview in March 1960 Powell referred to a Harlem widow, Esther James, as a “bag woman,” someone who collected graft for corrupt police. She sued and won. Powell refused to apologize or pay, or even respond to subpoenas to appear in court to explain his failure to comply. After he was cited for contempt of court in November 1966, a Select Committee of the House investigated Powell's affairs, partly because of the James case and partly because of an alleged misuse of public funds. Powell remained convinced that the real purpose was a racist attempt to silence a key proponent of civil rights. In March 1967 the Select Committee recommended Powell's public censure and his loss of seniority. The full House went farther and voted to exclude Powell from the Ninetieth Congress. In a special election to fill the vacant seat, Powell trounced his opponents. Then, after a successful fund-raising effort, he paid James her award. An agreement was worked out that ended the threat of jail for contempt of court so—after spending much of 1967 in an idyllic exile on Bimini—he could return to New York whenever he wished. In January 1969 the House voted to seat him in the Ninety-first Congress, though it stripped him of his seniority and fined him for misuse of payroll and travel funds. Later that year, in Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ruled against the House's exclusion of him in 1967.

After being out of Congress from 1967 to 1969, Powell retrieved his seat. But he was no longer committee chairman, and his power had evaporated. Worse, in 1969 Powell was hospitalized with cancer. Weakened physically and politically he nonetheless entered the Democratic primary in 1970 but was narrowly defeated by State Assemblyman Charles Rangel. Powell's time in Congress was over. He wrote an autobiography and retired in 1971 from Abyssinian Baptist.

Powell liked one characterization of him as “arrogant, but with style.” His legacy is a mixed one, for his personal presumptions clouded his political accomplishments. Yet during the 1940s and 1950s he ranked with A. Philip Randolph among the great leaders of African Americans. He proved a resourceful and effective leader in America's largest city from the 1930s through World War II. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s he combined his political position as a congressman with a commitment to progressive politics that far outstripped his few black congressional predecessors of the 1930s or his few black colleagues of the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s he had greater power to get things done, but he was also less irreplaceable, for American politics had begun to catch up with his positions on matters of race and class. He died in Miami, Florida.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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