Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was the first modern African American politician and the first black Congressman to exercise real power in the halls of Washington, D.C. Yet, after scaling the summit of power, Powell lost it all, seemingly fatigued by the failure of liberalism to deliver on providing the American Dream to all Americans, regardless of color, and tripped up by his own moral shortcomings.
Handsome and brilliant, the young Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. became famous as the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, succeeding his father in the pulpit in 1936. The six-foot, four-inch Adam Jr. exuded charisma, which made him extremely popular among many ladies of the congregation. The young Adam Jr., was able to “pass” as white when he was young as he was of “mixed-race” parentage: His mother’s father was Caucasian. Powell must have been constantly faced with the arbitrariness inherent in the concept of “race” that further made nonsense of the whole idea of a “color bar,” as segregation was then known.
Like Barack Obama, another mixed-race politician who would achieve prominence as a politician on the national stage, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. identified as African American. However, in Powell’s age, the idea of a black man becoming President of the United States was an impossibility. Indeed, when Powell was elected to Congress in 1944 (only the second African American to be elected to Congress from the Union States of the North), he was only one of two so-called “Negroes” to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives. Most African Americans, still living in the Confederate States of the South, could not vote due to legal segregation.
In Congress, he and his fellow African American Representative had to put up with the indignities of the Jim Crow regulations that racist Congressmen had implemented for Congressional facilities. These were restrictions Adam Clayton Powell relished fighting as his style was, and remained, basically confrontational. He did not gladly suffer the fools of segregation.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908, where his father had attended Yale’s Divinity School while serving as pastor of the city’s Emanuel Baptist Church. The year of Adam, Jr.’s birth, Adam, Sr. took over the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and turned it into a great success. After graduating from New York City’s public schools, the young Adam matriculated at City College of New York, but flunked out due to his love of partying. It was the height of the Harlem Renaissance, and a taste for the high life that later would prove his Achilles’ heel was fully developed even then. Under pressure from his father, he attended the nearly all-white Colgate University, where he initially studied medicine with the idea of becoming a surgeon.
Realizing that he could become the pastor of his father’s church, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. switched to theology and eventually took his at Union Theological Seminary, then later ater at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College. He earned his in 1932. He continued his master’s degree in religious education at Columbia, then continued his religious studies at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina and became an ordained minister. (Shaw University was the birthplace of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the premier civil rights groups of the 1960s.)
It is generally assumed that unlike his father, Adam, Jr. didn’t really have a calling to the pulpit, but in those racist times, when segregation was legal, the church was one of the few areas where a talented, intelligent African American could succeed.
Whether his ardor was real or not, he joined his father at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York’s premier African American church in the center of what was then the capital of black American culture, Harlem. He expanded the church’s outreach towards the poor and made his name as a civil rights activist tackling racism in New York City. Powell proved to be masterful at organizing boycotts of businesses that refused to hire blacks during the Great Depression. His intent was to create political pressure to force the City government to expand opportunities for blacks.
He called his boycott the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign. It had a simple premise: Don’t patronize businesses that did not hire black folk. Powell told the people of Harlem that they had the power to create change in their communities.
“It’s in your hand,” Powell said. Just like little David had those smooth stones and killed big Goliath with them. Use what you have right in your hand. That dollar…that ten cents. Use your vote. The Negro race has enough power right in our hands to accomplish anything we want to.”
One of Powell’s major achievements was getting the organizers of the 1939 New York World’s Fair to implement fair employment practices. That the theme of the Fair was “Building the World of Tomorrow” was appropriate to Adam Clayton Powell’s cause, as he was making strides for a better tomorrow for African Americans.
In addition to his pastoral duties, Adam Clayton Powell published a newspaper, The Peoples Voice from 1936 to 1944, serving as its editor and as a journalist. In addition, he was an instructor at Columbia University’s Extension School from 1932 to 1940. He was co-founder of the National Negro Congress before getting elected to the New York, New York City Council in 1941. From 1942 until he was elected to Congress, Powell served as a member of the New York State Consumer Division’s Office of Price Administration.
Adam Clayton Powell was elected to Congress to represent New York’s 22nd Congressional District encompassing Harlem in 1944. (Due to redistricting causes by population shifts, Powell later would represent New York’s 18th and 16th Congressional Districts in the 1950s and 1960s.) His election came a year after one of the first modern race riots occurred in the neighborhood of Harlem. On August 3, 1943, a riot broke out after a black soldier was shot by a white policeman he had knocked down in a scuffle. Frustration over both police brutality and the exploitation of white merchants, who sold to blacks but would not hire them, erupted in an orgy of looting that required 14,600 cops, military police and National Guardsman plus 1,500 civilian volunteers to put down.
The riot resulted in six fatalities, 185 injuries and the arrest of 500 African Americans, of whose number 1/5th were women. Hundreds of white-owned businesses were sacked, and property damage totaled $225,000 (about $3 million in today’s money). There had been a similar riot resulting in $200,000 in property damage on March 19, 1935, triggered by police brutality and feelings of economic impotence engendered by the Great Depression, but the 1943 Harlem riot was one of a cycle of spontaneous insurrections dubbed “Commodity Riots” as much of the focus of the rioters’ fury centered on the white-owned business in the African American community.
Exploited for generations by whites, African Americans during World War II were dismayed by the disconnect between the rhetoric of America’s war against fascism, its image as the “Arsenal of Democracy,” while denying democracy to African Americans at home. The war inflated the aspirations of African Americans, who were being drafted but forced to serve in segregated units commanded by white officers. The frustration boiled over into a riot in which white-owned shops were sacked. (Before African Americans rioted that summer, a “race riot” generally meant white folk going down to the black section of town to launch a pogrom.)
A. Philip Randolph, the president of theBrotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and thus one of the most powerful African Americans in the country, had met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943 and demanded that the defense industries be desegregated. There had been a boom in defense-related employment that had led to labor shortages, but skilled African Americans were ignored and denied jobs. Africans Americans in the military, drafted under a quota system, were typically assigned to support duties such as heavy labor, construction, cooking and mess-hall duties. Black soldiers who were stationed in the Deep South faced racism that crossed the line into abuse.
Randolph organized what would have been the first March on Washington to stage a protest against segregation and discrimination at the Lincoln Memorial, had it been staged, as planned, on July 1, 1941, when the U.S. still was at peace. (Randolph, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would be one of the chief organizers of the famous March on Washington of 1963, where King delivered his “I Have A Dream Speech” before the Lincoln Memorial.) Randolph told President Roosevelt that he would bring 100,000 African American protesters to Washington, and F.D.R. gave in signed Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, The order stated that, “There shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.” The Executive Order also established a Fair Employment Practices Committee was set up to investigate reports of discrimination.
Adam Clayton Powell was at the right place, at the right time. African Americans were demanding rights and ready to exercise their franchise to guarantee those rights. The Republican Party had been the home of many African Americans since the time of Reconstruction, but New York City was controlled by Tammany Hall, a Democratic machine, and it was as Democrats that inner-city blacks in New York City voted. Winning the 1944 Democratic nomination brought Powell a seat in Congress.
In 1954, the Supreme Court overturned legal segregation with Brown v. Board of Education. The Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, set off when Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up to a white man and go to the back of the bus, brought another preacher who also was a preacher’s son, Martin Luther King, Jr. to national prominence. Unlike Powell, King had a genuine calling as a preacher and was a profound man of faith. He would become the face of the modern civil rights movement, a movement that would bring Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. power, but which he would fail, in the end. Powell was confrontational and controlling, and many times was behind efforts to undermine Dr. King.
It is undeniable that Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was committed to civil rights for African Americans, but his personal moral code was extremely faulty. He had a taste for the high life, and that required money. He had Congressional employees give him kickbacks in return for employment, and even padded his payroll with employees who no longer worked for him, pocketing their wages. This lead to tax problems, and Columbia University professor Charles V. Hamilton, the author of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma, believes that it was Powell’s tax problems that led him to embrace Dwight Eisenhower during the 1956 Presidential election.
Though inner-city blacks voted Democratic, nationally, the Republican Party was still home to African Americans, and it was a vote coveted by Ike (who, ironically, was personally racist). The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had threatened to boycott the 1956 Republican Convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, It was two years after legal segregation had been overthrown by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decisions, and Earl Warren — the GOP’s 1948 Vice Presidential candidate — had been appointed Chief Justice by Dwight Eisenhower. It was a confrontation Ike did not want.
Adam Clayton Powell, in exchange for Ike’s help in quashing his tax problems, agreed to endorse the Republican ticket, according to Hamilton. One can extrapolate further and understand Powell’s blackmailing of Martin Luther King to stop his threatened picketing of the Cow Palace as part of the deal. Powell had threatened to expose King’s chief speech writer, Bayard Rustin, as a homosexual, and to link him romantically to King. (Powell later would follow through with the threat and out Rustin, who was a white Jew and a communist.)
Seeking reelection, President Eisenhower won a landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson, racking up 457 Electoral College votes to Stevenson’s 73. All of Stevenson’s Electoral College votes came from the Solid South of the former Confederate states. Among the old Cofederate States of America, Ike managed to pluck Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Florida and Louisiana from the Democratic fold and also took the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and West Virginia.
Powell’s style, perhaps buttressed by his isolation in a Congress dominated by racists of his own Party from the Deep South, was confrontational, and unlike a politician like Lyndon Johnson, he created no deep and lasting friendships. He was a wheeler-dealer and a hustler. His manipulation of fellow civil rights activists, such as his treatment of Dr. King, bordered — if not crossed the border — the shameful.
During the 1950s, he developed a fondness for foreign junkets with his female staffers, after divorcing his second wife, the jazz pianist Hazel Scott in 1956. His third wife was put on the Congressional payroll, and he continued on his merry way, taking kickbacks and living the high life on the taxpayer’s dole.
Due to seniority, Powell eventually rose in Congress to the point that he could make a bid for the chairmanship of the Education & Labor Committee, one of the critical committees in the House of Representatives. The Committee controlled 40% of the domestic budget, and Powell wrangled a deal with John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for the Presidency, that he would use all his suasive power to get African Americans to vote for the Democratic ticket in exchange for his support for the chairmanship. Chairmanships were controlled by Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House from Texas, who had been the mentor of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Vice President on Kennedy’s ticket. In the 1956 election, the majority of African Americans had supported the Republican Presidential ticket, voting for Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. In 1960, it was Kennedy who won the lion’s share of the black vote.
John F. Kennedy won the election and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. got the chairmanship of the Education & Labor Committee. From this post, Powell was instrumental in passing legislation introduced by Presidents John F. Kennedy and J.F.K.’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, including such watershed programs as Medicare and Medicaid. The social programs that were part of Johnson’s vision of “The Great Society” were shepherded by Powell through his committee.
However, Adam Clayton Powell turned out to be a profoundly flawed human being. He had always had a taste for high living and women who were not his wife. Perhaps, fighting the good fight against racism for four decades exhausted him, made him too cynical. His absences from Congress became more and more frequent, and eventually, Powell came under suspicion for mismanaging the committee budget. He was accused of conversion of public funds for his own benefit, as he was fond of traveling on the public dole. He even charged the committee for trips to his aerie on the Bahamian isle of Bimini.
The high-water mark of President Lyndon Johnson’s legislative program was realized during the Congress of 1965-67, ushered in by L.B.J.’s landslide victory of November 1964, in which he crushed Barry Goldwater, the standard-bearer of the Republican Party. The reactionary Goldwater, who found President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be took liberal, had wrested the nomination from the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, and William Scranton, the governor of Pennsylvania, by tapping resentment against civil rights.
President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the first effective civil rights law enacted by Congress since the end of Reconstruction nearly a century earlier. Adam Clayton Powell had helped bring the Act to fruition as the most powerful African American politician in Washington, D.C. The Civil Rights Act angered racists, segregationists and right-wing, anti-government libertarians like Barry Goldwater. Goldwater was against civil rights and such social programs as Social Security, hallmarks of the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the hero of Lyndon Johnson and many black folk.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and Education & Labor Committee set records in passing legislation as Johnson set out not only to equal but surpass Roosevelt and the New Deal by enacting liberal, progressive laws to help the common people in general and African Americans in particular. However, L.B.J. also sowed the seeds of the cancer that would destroy his presidency and undermine liberalism: The Vietnam War. Liberalism, which seemed so remarkably ascendant in the period of 1964-66, would be swamped at the polls in 1968 after suffering a setback during the by-election of 1966. As the inner-cities burned on TV, white society began to evince a severe backlash against African Americans.
The remarkable days of Johnson’s Great Society gave way to the dog days of the late-1960s, as the inner-cities of America began to explode in “Long Hot Summers” of rioting. The first major riot was in Watts, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, in 1965, and it was followed by worse riots in Newark, New Jersey and Detroit, Michigan and other ghettos in following summers. African Americans, oppressed for centuries, simply could not wait, and took to the streets to meet out some revolutionary justice.
Powell’s absences from committee hearings became legion. It could be seen as symbolic of the anomie that was afflicting the African American community, that soon began afflicting liberalism in general, as a philosophy and political movement. It was if liberalism set off a cycle of violence both at home, in the ghettos, and abroad, in Vietnam.
Soon, Adam Clayton Powell seemed to lose interest. He became careless. Earlier, as a young man, his commitment to the church had been questioned. Some felt that he had just used the pulpit as a vehicle to obtain social position. Likewise, Powell’s commitment to social progress began to be questioned.
In a bizarre development that showed Powell was losing his political as well as moral judgment, he lost a slander lawsuit. The Congressman from Harlem refused to pay the judgment against him, which made him subject to arrest. Powell curtailed trips to New York to avoid being incarcerated, and began spending more time in Florida and Bimini, where he lived ostentatiously. His failure to be present in Congress for roll-call votes became a scandal of its own. While petty corruption of the kind practiced by Powell had long been a hallmark of Congressmen and Senators (U.S. Senator Tom Dodd was censured in June 1967 for misusing campaign funds) for the chairman of one of the most powerful committees in Congress to be absent regularly could not be tolerated.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. won his 11th bid for reelection to Congress in 1966, but when he went to take the oath of office in January 1967, Speaker of the House John McCormack refused to administer it to him. He was excluded from the chamber, and the House Democratic Caucus ousted Powell as chair of the Education & Labor Committee due to allegations of corruption, including the charge that he had converted Committee funds for his personal use.
The first act of the 90th Congress was a bill that denied Powell his seat in Congress. The House of Representatives refused to let him take his seat until the completion of an investigation by a Special Committee empowered by the Judiciary Committee. After the Select Committee reported its findings, in March of 1967 the House voted 307 to 116 to censure Powell and declare his seat vacant. He also was fined $40,000.
Always a fighter, Powell and 13 of his constituents filed a federal lawsuit against the Speaker and other House officials. In his lawsuit, Powell claimed that his expulsion was unconstitutional as the Constitution mandated a two-thirds vote to expel a member of a Congressional body, a bar the House had failed to meet. In the meantime, Powell ran for his vacated seat in a special election held in April, and won. He did not retake his seat, but continued his legal battle through the federal courts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 1969, in the case of Powell v. McCormack, that the expulsion was unconstitutional, agreeing with Powell’s argument that it took a two-thirds vote to exclude a member of Congress. Thus, Powell was able to retake his seat, but he had lost his seniority and his political power.
After being re-seated in Congress, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. again was criticized for absenteeism, and in the June 1970 Democratic primary, he was defeated by Charles B. Rangel. Powell vowed to get on the ballot as an independent for the November election, but did not. Resigning as the minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, he moved to Bimini, where he lived until April 1972, when he was hospitalized in Miami. He died on April 4, 1972 from acute prostatitis.
Sources:
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, “Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
The Black Collegian, “Black Power Between Heaven and Hell”
Voice of America News, “King of the Cats Recounts Life of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.”
Reference:
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr., warts and all (St. Petersburg Times) www.sptimes.com/2002/02/16/Floridian/Adam_Clayton_Powell_J.shtml
