Adam
Clayton Powell, Jr.
Black
Power Between Heaven and Hell
by
Tony Chapelle
During the middle girth of this century, Adam
Clayton Powell Jr. was the equivalent of the rap group Public Enemy,
the protest politician Jesse Jackson, and the Congressional Black
Caucus all in one.
Like Public
Enemy, Powell "dissed" white America for its racism and
hypocrisy, with one of his clearest refrains being akin to "You
Can't Trust 'Em." When he demanded changes in society, Powell,
as Jackson would years later, commanded so much attention in
Washington and with the media that he became known as "Mr. Civil
Rights." And as the first African-American congressman from the
northeast, and for decades the only militant African American on the
Hill, Powell had the guts to push through laws that forced America to
stop locking African Americans out of industries and institutions.
He didn't behave
like most African-American politicians. "I'm the first bad Negro
they've had in Congress," he bragged. He made more enemies on
Capitol Hill than perhaps any legislator before or since.
He didn't behave
like a typical African-American minister. "I believe only in the
teaching of Jesus," he said, "I am not a full-Bible
Christian." And he felt this distinction gave him wide moral
latitude. He openly drank alcohol, smoked, and had adulterous
affairs. When he strode up the aisle of his packed church to preach,
women parishioners later admitted to being distracted from thoughts
of God by enrapture with the tall playboy- minister.
Powell was born
in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1908. His father, who missed by one
month being born into slavery, pastored the most prestigious
African-American church in New York City, Abyssinian Baptist.
He stopped and
started through a checkered college career, first attending City
College of New York. Eventually, he flunked out. After that, Adam
went into a serious party mode. These were the Roaring '20s. Harlem,
with hundreds of speakeasies, rent parties, and dance halls, was a
wild bachelor's paradise. The little money he made as a kitchen
helper, he spent on gambling, women, and liquor.
But Adam's
father pushed him back into college, this time to almost all-white
Colgate University in up-state New York. Young Powell began studies
to become a surgeon 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.
Upon graduation,
his parents gave him a present of a trip to Europe, the Holy Land,
and Egypt. When he returned, he enrolled in Union Theological
Seminary, then later in Columbia University Teachers' College, where
he eventually took a master's degree in religious education.
While he worked
on postgraduate studies, Powell helped thousands in his community to
eat and find clothes and jobs. The Great Depression had America on
the dole and in despair. As assistant pastor under his father at
Abyssinian, Powell helped operate a free food pantry, job referral
service, and literacy classes. His compassion became legendary when
it was rumored that Adam once took the shoes from his own feet and
gave them to a poor man for whom the church clothing bin had no
proper sizes.
As he matured
into adulthood, Powell began speaking out against the institutional
racism ingrained in New York. In a short time, he racked up successes
in getting jobs back for doctors, forcing bus companies to hire
African-American drivers and mechanics, as well as squeezing white
store owners with the "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work"
campaign.
"It's in
your hand," he admonished his people. "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."
In 1941, he
became New York City's first African-American councilman. By 1944, he
had won a seat in Congress. It was heady, but lonely as one of the
only two African Americans in the U.S. House; particularly since the
other, William Dawson of Chicago, was more seen than heard, careful
to not upset the status quo.
Adam immediately
ripped into Congress for allowing lynching of African-American men to
continue. He railed against the unconstitutional Southern practice of
charging would-be, African-American voters "poll taxes."
Even Democratic presidents Roosevelt and Truman, who owed African
Americans for having voted for them, had to be dragged into issuing
executive orders ending discrimination in military bases and war
factories. If his colleagues ignored him and voted down his
proposals; if Truman, or Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson wouldn't
grant him a personal session to discuss civil rights or helping the
poor, Powell made vicious public statements or sent embarrassing
"open" telegrams to the press describing their
insensitivity.
Powell perfected
a role as agitator. "Whenever a person keeps prodding, keeps
them squirming...it serves a purpose. It may not in contemporary
history look so good, but...future historians will say, 'They served
a purpose."'
He was
African-American pride personified. He swaggered into the
congressional dining room and barber shop Knowing full well that
African Americans were not served there, and demanded service. He won
it. He badgered racist congressmen and stopped their habit of saying
the word "nigger" in sessions of Congress.
One of his most
dangerous legislative weapons was the "Powell Amendment," a
rider he tried to attach to any proposals for federal funds. The
beauty of the Amendment was that, if successfully attached to a bill,
it would nullify federal grants to state or local governments if the
agencies receiving the money discriminated. This meant, for example,
that even school districts in the deepest South had to open their
doors to African-American teachers and students or I risk losing
funds set aside for them.
Voters from
Harlem elected Powell as their representative nearly two dozen times.
With long service in Congress comes seniority and ultimately the
chance to head one of the powerful committees that draft bills that
the full House and Senate eventually vote on. After the election of
1960, Powell took over as chairman of the House Education and Labor
Committee. In that role, he had more concrete power than any African-
American man on the planet. His little club, as it were, could
initiate proposals worth billions of dollars and decisions affecting
millions of Americans, and hundreds of schools, labor unions, and
employment practices.
Here was where
Powell made his greatest contributions. He oversaw passage of the
backbone of President Kennedy's "New Frontier" and
President Johnson's "Great Society" social programs: A
sweeping anti- poverty bill, an increased minimum wage, a National
Defense Education Act that benefitted generations of high school and
college students.
Yet in the new
book, Adam Clayton Powell Jr.: The Political Biography of an American
Dilemma, Columbia University professor Charles V. Hamilton, an
African American, courageously addresses old allegations that Powell
misused his clout to clean up consequences of his personal excesses.
The extravagant
New Yorker suffered more than a decade of court cases over tax fraud,
and for taking kickbacks from employees who no longer worked for him.
Hamilton presents evidence that Powell supported Republican president
Dwight Eisenhower for re-election in 1956 in exchange for a promise
that Ike would kill the investigation.
There is no
denying, however, that despite his commitment to civil rights for his
people, Adam Powell Jr. was no paragon of virtue. He was egocentric,
self-indulgent, and often treacherous. To keep Martin Luther King Jr.
From picketing at the Republican convention where Eisenhower was to
be nominated, Powell threatened to publicly (and surely, falsely)
announce that King was having a homosexual relationship with another
civil rights activist, Bayard Rustin.
He had no
permanent friends, only permanent interests. At some points, he
aligned with traditional civil rights groups, then when it suited his
purposes he'd accuse them of being made up of Uncle Toms not worthy
of African Americans' support.
Ultimately,
Powell used up his political currency. Members of the House, happy to
find a reason to silence him, expelled him for pocketing
congressional employment paychecks to his wife, and for taking
junkets abroad with female staffers. The fighter in him took the case
all the way to the Supreme Court. He won back his seat. Even then, he
was docked $25,000 to repay the illegal kickback. But the people of
Harlem grew tired of Powell's unbelievable record of roll call
absences and endless litigations. In 1970, they finally voted him
out. Two years later, he died of prostate cancer at the age of 63.
Today, he isn't
as ubiquitous a symbol of African-American determination as Malcolm
X; you seldom find his likeness on t-shirts, or see film clips of his
speeches within music videos. Nor is his picture reverently displayed
in magazine ads during Black History Month like Martin Luther King,
Jr.'s. But African Americans with a knowledge of their history
remember Powell as the risk taker who made it possible for later
generations of African-American politicians such as Jesse Jackson,
Rep. Ron Dellums, and Willie Brown of the California Assembly to
stand unbowed in the arena of political horse trading.
And in Harlem,
where a state office building and a broad boulevard are named for
him, you can occasionally still visit an apartment home where his
picture adorns a place of honor.
Tony Chapelle
is a freelance writer in New York City.