Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr.

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Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr. 1908–1972

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a flamboyant U.S. civil rights leader and clergyman from New York. He became the first African American to wield extensive structural power in the U.S. Congress. Representing New York City’s community of Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1945 to 1971, Powell rose to be chairman of its powerful Education and Labor Committee (1961–1967), where he insured that key laws against racial discrimination and for economic and social justice were enacted.

The only child of Mattie Fletcher Schaefer Powell and the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Adam Jr. was born on November 29, 1908, in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father was pastor at the Emmanuel Baptist Church and studied at the Yale Divinity School. It was in that same year that his father accepted the position of pastor at the famed Abyssinian Baptist Church (ABC) in New York City.

Founded in 1808 by blacks refusing to abide any longer the racial segregation in Manhattan’s First Baptist Church, ABC was a venerable African-American institution. In its pulpit, Powell Sr. became one of the leading clergymen of his day. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University (1930) in Hamilton, New York, and a master’s degree from Columbia University (1932), Powell Jr. was hired by his father, first as the church’s business manager and community center director, and then as assistant pastor. The Depression-era soup kitchen and community outreach programs he developed at the ABC facilities on West 138th St. helped expand the congregation into a megachurch, boasting 14,000 members in the mid-1930s. This experience served as a solid basis for the younger Powell’s assaults on racial injustice after he succeeded his ailing father as pastor in 1937.

Powell Jr. led rent strikes to improve living conditions in Harlem and organized boycott campaigns designed to achieve better jobs for blacks. His work helped to improve public health care for blacks, particularly at the city’s Harlem Hospital, and to break employment barriers on city transport and other public utilities, as well as in many department stores and at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair held in New York City.

Powell never shirked the limelight. His ABC position and work focused further attention on him, which only grew as he matured. He represented a less restrained and more demanding “New Negro” community. He was a major supporter of the union leader A. Philip Randolph’s successful effort in setting up the National Negro Congress in Chicago in 1936. The aim of the congress, which was attended by more than 800 delegates, was to get the government to address the needs of blacks during the Depression.

Powell saw the potential of blacks’ concerted economic and political power. He believed that the large number of blacks drawn to Chicago in the Great Migration from the South to the North earlier in the century had illustrated that strength. It was in Chicago in 1928 that Oscar DePriest, whose family had moved north from Alabama in the 1878, became the first black in the twentieth century to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Subsequently, Chicago’s black voters elected Arthur W. Mitchell and William L. Dawson to that same seat.

Powell believed this process could be repeated in Harlem. He therefore entered electoral politics and was elected to the New York City Council in 1941. Using ABC as a base within the larger community of Harlem, Powell was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1945. Almost immediately he clashed with the legislative establishment, which was dominated by whites from the South. Rejecting practices that restricted blacks from certain congressional facilities, he demanded the same access as other members of Congress. On the House floor, he challenged segregationist members and programs. He routinely attached antidiscrimination clauses (initially ridiculed as the “Powell Amendment”) to federal spending measures, presaging federal antidiscrimination practices that became common in the 1960s. He also championed Third World independence and development in the years following World War II.

Powell rode the crest of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Through the rigid seniority rules of Congress, he became chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor in 1961. He used this position to advance desegregation and antipoverty legislation, raise the federal minimum wage, and increase funding for public education. A key figure behind the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, he also championed aid for persons with disabilities.

Powell’s open disregard for convention and his being one of only a half-dozen African-American congressmen in the mid-1960s made him conspicuous. His high living-style, notorious womanizing, and three marriages grated against traditional images of a suitably religious pastor. His political outspokenness made him an alluring target in the hotly contested civil rights era. Powell paid the consequences of his personal and political flamboyance in 1967. After charges of corruption, tax evasion, and misappropriation of funds, the House Democratic Caucus stripped him of his committee chairmanship, and in March 1967 the full House voted 307 to 116 to exclude him from membership. He challenged the action, appealing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in Powell v. McCormack (1969) ruled his exclusion unconstitutional. In the interim, Powell’s Harlem constituency twice reelected him. But he had other legal problems, having become something of a fugitive from his own district because of an unpaid 1963 libel judgment against him.

Fading but still fiery in the late 1960s, Powell represented a militancy that bridged black generations since the 1920s in their struggle against racism and segregation. His 1967 sermon “Black Power: A Form of Godly Power,” along with his six-sermon record album titled “Keep the Faith, Baby!” (1967), resonated for yet another generation insistent on more immediate racial and social justice. Emperor Haile Selassie in 1969 personally bestowed on Powell the Golden Cross of Ethiopia for his internationally recognized work. Yet Powell’s long peccadilloes, particularly his congressional absenteeism, finally exhausted his Harlem constituency’s patience, and in 1970 it replaced him with Charles B. Rangel. In decreasing health from a heart attack, chest tumor, and cancer, Powell withdrew to his Bahamian island retreat of Bimini. He died at sixty-three in Miami, Florida, on April 4, 1972.