Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

(29 November 1908 – 4 April 1973)

Claude Hargrove

Fayetteville State University

BOOKS: Marching Blacks: An Interpretive History of the Rise of the Black Common

Man (1945. Revised, New York: Dial Press, 1973);

Keep the Faith, Baby! (New York: Triden Press, 1967);

Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Dial Press,

1971);

OTHER:

U.S. Congress. House. Additional Views of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., on Minority

Report. 79th Cong., 2 sess. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946.

U.S. Congress. House. The New Image in Education: A Prospectus for the Future by the

Chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, Adam C. Powell. 87th Cong., 2

sess. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1962.

U.S. Congress. House. Adam Clayton Powell. Hearings, February 8, 14, 16, 1967. 90th

Cong., 1st sess. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1967.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., minister, social justice activist, and member of the U.S. House

of Representatives, first became famous by association with his father, the minister of the

Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem from 1908 to 1937. The younger Powell followed his

father’s path, actively participating in the church’s social welfare programs in the late 1920s and

throughout the Great Depression. The economic crisis caused Powell to involve himself in racial

and social justice causes, particularly those involving jobs for African Americans in New York.

He began to be known as a speaker outside the church in these years, and he wrote columns in

African American newspapers, one of which he founded and published. In 1937 he took charge

of the church, and in 1945 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives,

becoming the second African American representative elected since the Reconstruction period.

In that role Powell took part in the growing Civil Rights movement, and eventually a piece of

legislation he had sponsored made its way into the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He had always

been controversial, but in these years he faced a series of scandals that ended his political career.

He wrote his autobiography shortly before his death in 1973.

Powell was born on 29 November 1908 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Adam Clayton

Powell and Mattie Fletcher Powell. His sister Blanche was ten years old at the time. Born in

1865 in Virginia, twenty-five days after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the senior

Powell was a Baptist minister whose prominence in the Harlem community exerted a strong

determining force on the future of his son. The father had worked in West Virginia and Ohio

coal mines, but unfailingly gambled away most of his money until he experienced a religious

conversion at a revival meeting, decided to lead a life of sobriety, and began in 1885 to work as a

Baptist minister. Powell, Sr., ministered to the congregation of the Abyssinian Baptist Church

from its hundredth anniversary year of 1908, shortly after Adam’s birth, to 1937, when his only

son inherited the pastorate. Abyssinian Baptist was more than a church; it was a powerful force

in Harlem for social justice, well respected throughout New York and adjacent states. Powell,

Sr. built Abyssinian from church from a congregation of about sixteen hundred to above ten

thousand, and he helped to establish the social service mission of Abyssinian Baptist by erecting

a new church building, a community house, and a home for the aged.

Adam Powell, Jr., grew up in Harlem in comfort, with nice clothes, vacations, a nanny

named Josephine, and good table talk. Powell, Sr. adhered to many of the tenets of Marcus

Garvey’s belief system, and Powell, Jr., at the age of 15 joined Marcus Garvey's African

Nationalist Pioneer Movement. He attended high school at Townsend Harris Hall. He had a

checkered college career, first attending City College of New York, then flunking out after two

bad semesters. Afterward, Powell went into serious party mode. In the 1920s Harlem, with

hundreds of speakeasies, rent parties, and dance halls, was a wild bachelor's delight. The modest

amount of money he made as a kitchen helper, he spent on gambling, women, and liquor. He was

his father’s son -- of a bygone time back in West Virginia. In March 1926, Blanche Powell died

suddenly of peritonitis.

So Powell Senior pushed his son back into college, this time to an almost all-white

Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Powell came from an extremely fair-skinned family,

several of whom had passed as white on any number of occasions – his father when traveling in

the South or in Germany, for example, or his sister when working as a stenographer on Wall

Street. When he first went to Colgate Powell passed as white, but was exposed by classmates

who did research in New York and found that his father’s church was in Harlem. He very

quickly made it up with the handful of other young black male students, however, by apologizing

forthrightly and offering to help one of them with German, at which he excelled. In the summers

his father insisted that he must work, so Powell found employment, as many college students did,

in resort towns of New England. He still found his way back to the night life of New York City

from time to time, and on one such trip he met the woman who became his first wife, Isabel

Washington. She was a Catholic from Savannah, Georgia, married, and working as a dancer and

actress, none of which recommended her to the senior Powell.

Young Powell had an interest in going to Harvard to study medicine, but later, with some

prodding, realized that one day his father's well-off church could be his for the asking, so he

changed his mind about medicine to become a healer of souls. Powell was better educated than

most civil rights activists of his day, but fell short in formal theological training. His real

training for the ministry came from hearing thousands of Powell, Sr.’s sermons and witnessing

many of his good works. His first sermon at his father’s church was delivered on Good Friday,

1930, and he graduated from Colgate that June. His father rewarded him with a trip to Asia and

North Africa, and he returned in October. Powell briefly took graduate courses at Union

Theological Seminary, but then finished a master’s degree in religious education at Columbia

University Teachers’ College in 1932. Going to college part-time, he worked as an assistant

pastor under his father’s supervision and as the business manager of the church. Powell ran a

free food pantry, job referral service, and literacy classes. As a preacher he cautioned women

parishioners, who were mostly domestic servants, to give to the church only what they could

afford.

As a leader Adam Powell, Jr. inclined toward intolerance of racism and the use of racial

rhetoric in denouncing racists and overly cautious black leaders. His complexion, oratorical

skills, natural self-confidence, and quick wit earned Powell both admiration and hatred from

whites and from many black leaders, who generally espoused a philosophy of gradualism as a

strategy for challenging white racism. Powell was a radical from the start, a lover of both justice

and pleasure. He was styled a “militant” by both the white media and conservative African

Americans (who feared white backlash in northern states where they had made some gains).

The firing of five black interns from Harlem Hospital in the spring of 1930 prompted one

of Powell’s first public acts to promote racial justice. He had already joined his father and

members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in

taking on the remaining Tammany Hall fixtures who exerted control over the inferior hospital –

the only one available for African Americans in the area. Eventually the group had forced the

resignation of a city commissioner over the issue. The interns claimed their dismissals were due

to racial discrimination and asked Powell to represent them. Powell formed a support committee

and staged a series of mass rallies to dramatize the issues. The action culminated in Powell

leading 6,000 blacks to a Board of Estimates meeting at City Hall. While the demonstrators

waited in the streets, Powell took the interns’ case before the board, persuading them to reinstate

the interns immediately and order a general reform of the hospital. In 1932, Powell finally

convinced his father to allow him to marry Isabel Washington once her divorce was final. She

agreed to be baptized and join the church, and they were wed on 8 March 1933. Powell adopted

her son, Preston.

A New York Post reporter requested a comment from Powell on the Harlem Riot of

1935; he strongly criticized job and housing discrimination in New York City and police

brutality. Powell’s remarks elicited wide support in the Black community and led him to

contribute a regular column, “Soap box,” to the Amsterdam News. Powell understood the

number one issue for most people was making a living; African Americans were shoved onto the

bottom rung of jobs in Harlem and throughout America. The Great Depression harmed nearly

everyone, but for African Americans the situation worsened already bad rates of unemployment

and poverty everywhere in America. In Atlanta, Georgia, brash white men calling themselves the

“black shirts” demanded that no African American hold a job until all whites were employed.

Traditional “black jobs” began to go to unemployed whites. In the midst of black America, on

125th

Street in Harlem, only two African Americans were employed: one as a domestic and

another as a janitor.

In response, Powell began a campaign for jobs on two fronts. “Don’t buy where you

can’t work,” he bellowed to the jobless of Harlem who shopped at the many stores on that

thoroughfare, and the command became a slogan in all the groups concerned. In months the

owners of retail stores, pawn shops, restaurants, cleaners, and dozens of other businesses relented

and started hiring African Americans in higher level jobs as well as traditional ones. Powell then

took on a political ally, Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York City during the worst days of

the Great Depression and all of World War II. Powell wanted African Americans placed in city

jobs, not just as janitors but as motormen and conductors. The spoils system, maintained by the

politicians and the unions, had implicitly banned African Americans from civil service jobs. The

popular “Little Flower” was reluctant to battle Powell publicly and thus weaken the African

American-Democratic party alliance; he made important concessions. Thousands were not

hired, but the point was made; African Americans could realistically aspire to desirable jobs.

In 1937 Powell inherited his father’s pulpit, which he used for political organizing; the

church had about two-dozen full-time and part-time employees with ties to various sectors of the

Harlem community. In 1938 Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina, awarded Powell an

honorary doctorate of divinity. Powell forced the vendors of the 1939 World's Fair to hire and

promote African American employees. In 1941 he won a city council seat as an independent.

Powell rejected party loyalty: “I always liked the guy who was nationally a Democrat,

locally a Republican, theoretically a Socialist, but practically a Communist.” [HLF1] African

Americans, Powell reasoned, should not be tied to one party; thus they could be swing voters

with greater political weight. He also formed important alliances with Jewish leaders in the city,

in particular Morris Rosenblatt, who recognized Powell’s organizing abilities and often asked

him to speak at Zionist rallies, and Stanley Isaacs, with whom Powell drafted housing bills. In

1941 Powell and Mayor LaGuardia endorsed each other and campaigned together. Powell was

elected to the city council that year; he continued to press for civil rights and for jobs for African

Americans in public transportation and the city colleges.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began to monitor Powell in 1942, as his influence

drastically increased. Powell co-founded and published the People’s Voice from 1942 to 1946.

Leader of the largest African American church in the nation (13,000 members--a sizeable basis

of support), he was ready to use his ample skill in political demagoguery and his charisma in

defense of African American nationalism. At the time only few African Americans were on the

faculty of the city-run colleges. An instructor, an African American and a member of the

Communist Party, was terminated at the City College of New York. In the city council Powell

raised the general issue of African American faculty positions and introduced a resolution to

eliminate discrimination in the city colleges; however, a committee of inquiry concluded that the

colleges did not discriminate and did hire faculty on the basis of merit.

Still, Powell’s resolution angered many of his white supporters. Powell’s consistent and

continuous criticism of the city government also strained relations between him and Mayor

Fiorello LaGuardia, who had come to see Powell as irresponsible and opportunistic. Powell saw

LaGuardia as paternalistic, and other African Americans agreed with him. In the midst of their

growing distrust, in July 1943 Detroit exploded in a race riot, requiring federal troops to end the

riot. Black and white migration from the South had fueled the outbreak of hostility. Rumor

making stirred both blacks and whites to violence. Blacks believed that whites had raped and

murdered a black woman and her daughter and then killed them. Whites believed that blacks

were randomly assaulting white women. Black and white gangs did the rest with stones and

guns stolen from pawn shops. Powell warned LaGuardia and the city council that conditions in

Harlem paralleled Detroit and that a race riot seemed likely if measures were not taken to

ameliorate the many problems of Harlem.

The next month his prediction proved accurate as Harlem blew up again over an incident

involving Private Robert Bandy, charged with assaulting a police officer during the arrest of an

African American woman. Rumors spread that police officers had killed a black soldier who

was trying to protect his mother. Black gangs looted stores and burned buildings. Both the

mayor and Powell called for calm, which returned after two days of rioting. Powell praised

LaGuardia’s handling of the police and keeping casualties down. Despite Powell’s refusal to use

the riot for political purposes, it improved his relationship for the time being with white

supporters. Then the state legislature created a new congressional district in Harlem which

guaranteed that an African American would be elected to Congress. In 1944 Powell was elected

to Congress as a Democrat; he was candidate for all three major parties, and even had the

backing of the Communists. Powell was the second black to be elected to Congress since the

Reconstruction era (William Dawson of Chicago was the first Black to be elected in the 20th

century to Congress). Powell served as congressman for the new district from 1945 until 1971.

Powell’s wife, Isabel Washington Powell, had figured importantly in helping his

campaign for the New York City council and in his election to Congress, although she said

afterward that she had advised against politics as a career. As Congressman Powell rose to

national celebrity, however, he began to see his wife’s background as a hindrance to his career;

they separated in late 1944. Even before his divorce was legal, Powell attended official

functions in Washington, D.C. in the company of Hazel Dorothy Scott, a young, pretty, and

talented jazz and classical pianist and singer with a Julliard education. Born in Trinidad and

Tobago and acclaimed as a musical genius by her teachers, she was very suitable to Washington,

D.C.’s Black privileged class.

In April 1945 Powell’s mother died. The Powell divorce became final in June of that

year. Hazel Scott and Powell married in Stamford, Connecticut on 1 August 1945. She soon

found, however, that Adam Powell’s habitual infidelity left her alone and inconsolably

miserable. Powell’s personal life was veiled from his admirers; his detractors knew some of the

scandalous details and waited for a chance to discredit him. Many aspects of his private life apart

from his family remained cloaked in mystery until later, but clearly all was never well in

Powell’s house. Hazel Scott was an established celebrity when Powell met her; she socialized

with jazz music stars and had been in films. After the marriage she continued to live in her own

sphere apart from Powell, which gave her much satisfaction, with a TV show, The Hazel Scott

Show, Broadway plays, and successful recordings like “Tico Tico.” She was a critic of Senator

McCarthy and racial segregation; her show was cancelled when she was accused of being a

Communist sympathizer.

Scott never found acceptance in his church, and the pair established a permanent

residence in White Plains, New York. Nor did Powell much resemble other African-American

ministers. He claimed he followed only the teachings of Jesus as embodied in the Gospels, not

the entire Bible, because “it is too filled with contradictions.” (quoted in Charles V. Hamilton,

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of An American Dilemma, p. 85) Powell did

not see a moral conflict between his transgressions and the basic tenets held by most Christians

on conduct. He publicly consumed alcohol, smoked, and had adulterous affairs. Adam Clayton

Powell, Jr.’s interior dimensions were not easy to understand; he was personable and full of

energy, but he lived in permanent motion with little time for deep reflection on religion or

politics. Hazel Scott Powell later claimed that her husband suffered from hyperthyroidism, and

that this glandular imbalance accounted for Powell’s indefatigable vigor in play and work as both

congressman and pastor. The image of a tireless and cool Powell was vital to his success as a

minister and civil rights activist.

In January 1945, Powell began his first term in Congress, immediately launching an

assault on antique southern customs and their most vocal defenders. This breach of the informal

segregation of the Capitol earned much dislike from southern congressmen and a reputation of

being brash. Congressman William Dawson observed the racist customs by carrying his lunch to

the Capitol in a paper bag. Dawson opined that he could achieve more for his constituents

through quiet and thoughtful demeanor and dialogue. Powell defied congressional policies that

were racist, insisting on ending segregation in the armed forces and public schools. Powell

introduced legislation to outlaw lynching and poll taxes without success. He also fought to

prohibit discrimination in housing and employment. Congressman John E. Rankin of

Mississippi, a white supremacist, numbered among the first of Powell’s new colleagues to feel

his wrath; after Rankin made ethnic slurs against Jewish people, Powell called for congressional

censure. Rankin announced that he would not sit by Powell in Congress. Powell replied angrily

that he shared the sentiment and that Rankin was a fascist fit to sit by the likes of Hitler and

Mussolini. Powell readily won the approval of African Americans in Harlem and throughout the

nation. Dressing down a southern racist guaranteed Powell’s continuous electoral victories in

the 22nd

Congressional district.

These were heady years for Powell. Writers Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry worked

for his campaign at various times, and the money was pouring in. In 1946 Adam Clayton

Powell, Sr., married Inez Means, who was blonde, fair, and rumored white – but for his son,

Powell Sr.’s new relationship meant even more freedom. Powell’s son, Adam Clayton Powell

III (“Skipper”) was born on 17 July 1946, and whatever their other differences, both Powell and

Scott were devoted to their son. Powell sustained political wounds, however, when he tangled

with President Harry S. Truman over the disrespect shown his wife by Bess Truman, whom

Powell decried as the “last lady of the land” when she did not give up her membership in the

racially discriminating Daughters of the American Revolution. (quoted in Wil Haygood, The

King of the Cats: the Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., p. 129) The organization had

denied Hazel Scott the use of Constitution Hall because of her race, just as it had done to Marian

Anderson a few years before. President Truman became very angry at Powell’s comments, made

to the national media, and Powell quickly found himself marginalized by the president and the

Democratic Party. For six years Powell was not invited to the White House. Federal patronage

for Harlem was routed through the office of Congressman Dawson.

Powell’s pride and impulsiveness limited his ability to help his Harlem constituents until

the 1960s, although his behavior continued to win their approval. Given the reality in the

national Capital, Powell’s influence was restricted anyway. Racial segregation was the norm;

racist epithets still enjoyed casual use in Congress by southerners like Theodore Bilbo, James

Eastland, and John Rankin. Nonetheless, Powell saw himself as a courageous fighter for social

justice and racial equality: "I'm the first bad Negro they've had in Congress," he [HLF2] bragged.

He made more enemies on Capitol Hill than perhaps any legislator before or since.

Powell’s life and times coincided with the momentous events that led to the civil rights

movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In May 1954 the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia visited

Powell’s church and awarded him the Gold Cross of Ethiopia for his Depression-era work of

relief in Harlem: he wore it everywhere. Although Powell was a prominent and popular

representative from Harlem, he was never fully accepted by more traditional black leaders. In a

real sense, Powell stood between two extremes: Black nationalists who wanted self-segregation

and possibly a separate nation and gradualists who waited for the courts to act or for the hearts of

men to change. Powell’s approach combined the heated language of revolution with the restraint

of nonviolence, but Powell was a foe of racism, not the white race. Often when he attacked

racism, however, some of Powell’s critics and enemies saw it as anti-white racism. In the short

term Congressman Powell’s efforts proved more productive in his drive to desegregate the

military and the government. The speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn, had admonished Powell

to observe the U.S. Capitol’s segregation etiquette in restaurants, barbershops, and gymnasiums.

Powell ground down those mainstays of racism without stint and demanded the seating of

African American journalists in the House’s press gallery.

From the very beginning of his rise to political power, however, he had been pragmatic

and cynical, courting Communist support and then snubbing those supporters, pulling strings to

keep his adopted son, Preston, out of combat in World War II, and demanding large sums of cash

in exchange for speaking engagements and political favors. After Truman froze him out, Powell

threw support to the Republicans for a few years, especially after his father died in June 1953. In

the 1956 presidential election Powell supported the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Powell

believed that Eisenhower, without the need to satisfy southern Democrats, would be more

progressive on civil rights. Powell might have bolted the Democrats for personal reasons, also,

such as to forestall a federal tax fraud investigation that began in the early 1950s, when several

of Powell’s aides were convicted of income tax evasion, and rumors circulated that they had also

given Powell kickbacks from their salaries.

In the late 1950s he began to have to face some consequences of his actions over the past

decade. In early 1957 Hazel Scott left him, moving to Paris with their son. Powell was indicted

in 1958 for tax evasion; the trial resulted in a hung jury, and the Justice Department declined to

retry him. In late 1959, following surgery to remove a benign tumor from his chest, Powell went

to Puerto Rico, where he met Yvette Flores. About the same time Powell declared war on

organized crime when it began to edge out Black numbers runners in Harlem. When city police

were not responsive enough, Powell began to name names on the floor of the House of

Representatives. There he had immunity, but when he repeated the charges as a guest on a

television show, in March 1960 Esther James, whom he had identified as a “bag woman” for

police graft, brought suit against him for defamation and libel. Powell refused to make a

settlement, and the case dragged on for eight years. He ignored all seven subpoenas.

During the presidential campaigns of 1960 he returned to the Democrats, at first to

support Johnson –Kennedy’s record on civil rights did not impress him. Later he supported John

F. Kennedy, bringing with him many of the African American votes that had gone to Eisenhower

in 1956. Powell appeared on the podium with Kennedy at an October 1960 campaign stop in

Harlem. Despite the presence of an aging Eleanor Roosevelt, Kennedy made jokes to the effect

that Powell probably had more children named after him than Jefferson or Washington, not just

because of his statesmanship. Shortly after his divorce became final, Powell returned to Puerto

Rico in December and married Yvette Flores. He was still friendly with Fidel Castro and took

his new wife by boat to Cuba to meet him. Their son Adam Diego Powell (“Adamcito”) was

born in 1961.

Powell’s legislative accomplishments were significant during the administrations of

President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The so-called Powell Amendment, a rider on

appropriation bills requiring states to desegregate public schools, was, according to Powell

himself, his greatest accomplishment. The Amendment, in reality crafted by the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was voted down; however, its

concept and Powell’s rhetoric helped to shape the ideology of African American goals in the

long struggle for equality and social justice. The essence of the Powell Amendment finally

reached fruition in Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Kennedy’s presidency coincided with

Powell’s rise to seniority in the House and the chairmanship of the powerful House Committee

on Education and Labor; the committee controlled a significant fraction of the domestic budget.

The committee approved over fifty measures establishing federal program for minimum wage

increases, education and training for the deaf, Head Start, school lunches, vocational training,

student loans and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and

secondary education and public libraries.

During this time Powell’s relationships with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kenneth Clark

offered some insight into Powell’s character. When King threatened pickets at the Republican

convention where Eisenhower was to be nominated, Powell indicated to King that he was

prepared to make public the rumors that King was having a homosexual relationship with Bayard

Rustin. Powell and Kenneth Clark clashed over the executive directorship of HARYOU,

Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited and ACT, Associated Community Teams, projects. In

1965 President Johnson’s war on poverty awarded $110 million to Clark’s project; Powell

insisted on a merger between ACT, his pet project, and HARYOU. The struggle between the

two was long and fiery. When Clark was asked about his relationship with Powell, he said, “I

like him. Adam was one of the most honest, corrupt human beings I have ever met. One of the

reasons I like Adam is that he had so few illusions.” Clark said Powell told him during their

conflict, “Ah, Kenneth, stop being a child. If you come along with me, we can split a million

bucks.” (quoted in Kenneth Clark’s New York Times obituary, “Kenneth Clark, Who Helped

End Segregation, Dies at 90,” 2 May 2005) Clark said he turned down the offer. Powell’s habit

of sarcasm and outspokenness gravely wounded him politically. He did not seem to engender

loyalty in individuals but in groups and especially among his Harlem voters. He had no

permanent friends; he sided with traditional civil rights groups and later would accuse them of

being unworthy of the support of African Americans. Such behavior often made Powell look

like a loose cannon who easily alienated many supporters.

Powell’s lavish lifestyle and over seas junkets made him a large target for his fellow

congressmen and others who never wished him well. The more powerful Powell became, the

more often his name became associated with scandal. By the mid-1960s his legislative gains

could not protect him from the defection of allies and the results of his own corrupt habits.

Martin Luther King did not criticize him, nor did the other civil rights leaders. Powell’s

customary argument, “it’s because I am black” proved not as successful as it had in earlier

decades. Attempting to polish his stained image, Powell changed his strategy, portraying himself

as a contemplative and smart political leader. His oratory had served him well in the past, and he

thought perhaps it would again. He took to the stump: in a Chicago speech entitled “My Life

Philosophy,” he outlined a program that would move the civil rights movement to its next stage.

The speech, actually a position paper as well as an attempt to establish Powell as a thoughtful

and moderate leader, explained the development of his ideas over the decade. He described what

needed to be done to complete the civil rights movement in the latter sixties.

Powell noted that Martin Luther King, Jr. had fought segregation, as he had, but what

came next in correcting centuries of racism was debatable. Stokely Carmichael and the Black

Power movement were dangerous, he thought, and would cause a white backlash. Powell called

instead for “audacious power” through self-assertion, emphasizing the importance of black pride

and more and better jobs for African Americans. African Americans, Powell said, were not

fruitful producers, with capital in hand, nor were they wise consumers. Even this attempt at

moderation failed, however, when detractors emphasized Powell’s comment “that the Negro

revolt must change into a black revolution.”[HLF3] Powell, justifiably, claimed that without going

beyond desegregation and establishing economic and social justice, African American progress

in America would stall and African Americans would remain the “the hewers of wood and

carriers of water.”[HLF4]

Criticism from Powell’s colleagues continued unabated. In 1966 a House committee

found Powell had improperly placed his wife on his committee’s payroll and vacationed at

committee expense in Europe and the Bahamas. Powell claimed that he was doing no more than

other members of Congress. He further argued that he was being held to a racist double

standard. Many of his old foes, including Kenneth Clark, agreed, but that did not help him.

Powell’s seniority was a threat to many congressmen who out ranked Powell but were older or

would soon retire; others feared Powell at 58 could serve for another decade or longer, or

perhaps even become Speaker of the House. Powell finally escaped to Bimini in 1966 with his

receptionist, Corinne Huff (a former Miss Ohio). Huff had been with Powell on the Queen Mary

to Europe in 1962 when she was 21, along with Tamara Hall (an associate labor counsel for

Education and Labor Committee).

Powell was playing “Russian roulette” with his career and risking being sent to prison.

Members of the House were happy to investigate him for pocketing congressional employment

paychecks to his wife and for taking junkets abroad with female staffers. Conservatives and

southerners saw an opening to do away with the racial agitator and liberal. Powell’s liberalism

earned him a 100 percent rating by the Americans for Democratic Action, and he was a key

player in Kennedy’s New Frontiers and Johnson’s Great Society. Johnson was the only one who

could “manage” Powell, but he stayed silent during Powell’s troubles. In several telephone calls

President Johnson reprimanded Powell for not keeping his word about promised legislation. In

1967 a select committee of the House recommended public censure of Powell, stripped him of

his committee chairmanship and seniority, and dismissed Huff. The committee also

recommended that Powell be fined, but in March the House rejected these proposals and voted

307 to 116 to exclude him from the Congress for the rest of the term.

In 1968 Powell won a special election to fill the vacancy caused by his expulsion, but

Powell did not attempt to take his seat, knowing that Congress would continue to exclude him.

In 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court held that although Congress could expel a member, it could not

deny a seat to someone duly elected. Powell finally took his seat after an absence of two years,

but without seniority and with his pay docked to pay for financial abuses. In 1970 Charles

Rangel emerged from a field of several Democratic contestants to defeat Powell. In 1971 Powell

completed his autobiography. He died of prostate cancer on 4 April 1973 at the age of 65.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., lived an astonishing life in the midst of the African American

struggle for equality and social justice. To only emphasize his crusade for fair employment,

adequate housing, and integrated education in New York City and his congressional record

would omit the heart of his political life, however. Powell was a complex individual who

seemed to be unable to compromise or cooperate with friends and political opponents to gain

some political benefit. Many articles and several books have been written about Adam Clayton

Powell, Jr. Some of them point out his shortcomings as congressman and as clergy; others praise

his courage and steadfast devotion to his 22nd

Congressional District of Harlem and to African

Americans across the nation. Charles Rangel later said of Powell:

Adam Powell was one of the most effective legislators who ever served in

Congress. He was the only idol we had in those days in Harlem. He was

audacious and all of us thought when we entered politics that we wanted to be like

Adam. God must have sent him, because we’ll never see another like him.

The philosophical Powell, while unformed by education or contemplative thought over

time, was experientially shaped by his father’s sermons, impressions as a teenage listener to

Marcus Garvey’s speeches on Black Nationalism, and a dozen street corner orators who

advocated a variety of ideas challenging the status quo. Unstructured as this “education” was, it

allowed for a kind of pragmatism that fitted well with Powell’s innate cynicism and smart mind.

Powell understood sooner than many African Americans the mercilessness of capitalism, the

natural rights of all human beings to be equal before the law, the importance of apposite

employment in the slums of America, and the necessity of intellectually confronting racism and

segregation. Like W.E. B. Dubois and Kenneth Clark, the psychologist and steadfast warrior for

improvement of the public schools in Harlem, Powell seemed to reject integration for

desegregation. Desegregation did not require, Powell claimed, that African Americans discard

cherished values by assimilation into the culture of the larger society. In that sense, Powell was

a kindred spirit to Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, who believed that Black culture was

good enough and surrendering it would be an implicit admission of their people’s inferiority to

other ethnic groups. Powell’s constituents regarded him as “Mr. Civil Rights” although he

exhibited character flaws and suffered under racial double standards. (quoted in Haygood, King

of the Cats, p. 171) Powell had excellent prospects and might have parlayed his rhetorical skills

into true political greatness, but his personal limitations in the end proved too great to overcome.

His life was the subject of a 2002 film created by his sons, entitled Keep the Faith, Baby!

References:

“Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: Black Americans in Congress, 1870-1989,” Office of the Historian,

U.S. House of Representatives (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1991);

Alexander E. Curtis, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: A Black Political Educator (New York:

ECA, 1983);

Albert N.D. Brooks, “Profile of a Fighter,” Negro History Bulletin 20 (May 1957);

Dominic, J. Capeci, Jr., “From Different Liberal Perspectives: Fiorello La Guardia, Adam

Clayton Powell, Jr., and Civil Rights in New York City, 1941-1943,” Journal of Negro

History, 62 (April 1977): 160-73;

Emmett Coleman [pseudo. of Ishmael Reed], ed. The Rise and Fall…? of Adam Clayton

Powell (New York: Bee-Line Books, 1967);

Lenworth A. Gunther III, Flamin’ Tongue: The Rise of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. 1908-

1941. Ph.D. Thesis, Columbia University, Department of History, 1985.

Charles V. Hamilton, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of An American

Dilemma (New York: Atheneum, 1991);

James Haskins, Adam Clayton Powell: Portrait of a Marching Black (New York: Dial

Press, 1974);

Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993);

Neil Hickey and Ed Edwin, Adam Clayton Powell and the Politics of Race (New

York: Fleet Publishing, 1965);

Robert E. Jacoubek, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Chelsea House, 1988);

Claude Lewis, Adam Clayton Powell (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1963);

Lawrence J. McAndrews, “The Rise and Fall of the Powell Amendment,” Griot, 12

(Spring 1993): 52-64;

Kent M.Weeks, Adam Clayton Powell and the Supreme Court (New York:

Dunellen, 1971);

Papers:

Powell’s papers reside at the Schomburg Library, New York City. Other collections with

significant Powell material include the NAACP Papers, Library of Congress; the American

Baptist Historical Society Papers, Rochester, New York; and the papers of various

contemporaries in the Municipal Archives, New York, New York. Powell’s file in the Archives

of the Federal Bureau of Investigation contains the best known collection of many of his

periodical publications.