Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (November 29, 1908 – April 4, 1972) was an American Baptist pastor and politician who represented the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the United States House of Representatives from 1945 until 1971. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York, as well as the first from any state in the Northeast. Re-elected for nearly three decades, Powell became a powerful national politician of the Democratic Party, and served as a national spokesman on civil rights and social issues. He also urged United States presidents to support emerging nations in Africa and Asia as they gained independence after colonialism.
In 1961, after 16 years in the House, Powell became chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, the most powerful position held by an African American in Congress to that date. As chairman, he supported the passage of important social and civil rights legislation under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Following allegations of corruption, in 1967 Powell was excluded from his seat by Democratic Representatives-elect of the 90th United States Congress, but he was re-elected and regained the seat in the 1969 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in Powell v. McCormack. He lost his seat in 1970 to Charles Rangel and retired from electoral politics.
Early life and education Powell was born in 1908 in New Haven, Connecticut, the second child and only son of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Mattie Buster Shaffer, born poor in Virginia and West Virginia, respectively. His sister, Blanche, was 10 years older. His parents were of mixed race with African and European ancestry and, according to his father, American Indian on his mother's side. In his autobiography Adam by Adam, Powell says that his mother had partial German ancestry. They and their ancestors were classified as mulatto in 19th-century censuses. Powell's paternal grandmother's ancestors had been free persons of color for generations before the Civil War.J. Daniel Pezzoni, "Hook-Powell-Moorman Farm": Historic Nomination Form , United States Department of the Interior, 1995.1860 US Census, "Adam Duning" and family, Franklin County, North Eastern Division, Virginia. By 1908, Powell Sr. had become a prominent Baptist minister, serving as a pastor in Philadelphia, and as lead pastor at a Baptist church in New Haven.
Powell Sr. had worked his way out of poverty and through Wayland Seminary, a historically black college, and postgraduate study at Yale University and Virginia Theological Seminary.Frank Lincoln Mather (editor), Who's Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (1915), Volume 1, page 222. In the year of his son's birth in New Haven, Powell Sr. was called as the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He led the church for decades through major expansion, including fundraising for and the construction of an addition to accommodate the increased membership of the congregation during the years of the Great Migration, as many African Americans moved north from the South. That congregation grew to a community of 10,000 people.
Due to his father's achievements, Powell grew up in a wealthy household in New York City. Because of some of his European ancestry, Adam was born with hazel eyes, light skin and blond hair, such that he could pass for white. However, he did not play with that racial ambiguity until college. He attended Townsend Harris High School, then studied at City College of New York before starting at Colgate University as a freshman. The four other African American students at Colgate at the time were all athletes. For a time, Powell briefly passed as white, using his appearance to escape racial strictures at college. The other black students were dismayed to discover what he had done. Encouraged by his father to become a minister, Powell became more serious about his studies at Colgate, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1930. After returning to New York, Powell began his graduate work and in 1931 earned an M.A. in religious education from Columbia University. He became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first African-American, intercollegiate Greek-lettered fraternity.Brown, Tamara L.; Parks, Gregory S.; Phillips, Clarenda M. (February 17, 2012). "African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision". University Press of Kentucky.
Later, apparently trying to bolster his black identity, Powell would say that his paternal grandparents were born into slavery. However, his paternal grandmother, Sally Dunning, was at least the third generation of free people of color in her family. In the 1860 census, she is listed as a free mulatto, as were her mother, grandmother, and siblings. Sally never identified the father of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., born in 1865. She appeared to have named her son after her older brother Adam Dunning, listed on the 1860 census as a farmer and the head of their household. In 1867, Sally Dunning married Anthony Bush, a mulatto freedman. All the family members were listed under the surname Dunning in the 1870 census.
The family changed its surname to Powell when they moved to Kanawha County, West Virginia, as part of their new life there.1870 Census, "Anthony Dunning" and family, Franklin County, Bonbrook PO, Virginia; and 1880 Census, "Anthony Powell" and family, Cabin Creek, Kanawha County, West Virginia. According to Charles V. Hamilton, a 1991 biographer of Powell, Anthony Bush "decided to take the name Powell as a new identity", and this is how they were recorded in the 1880 census.1880 Census, "Anthony Powell" and family, Cabin Creek, Kanawha County, West Virginia.
Adam Jr.'s mother, Mattie Buster Shaffer, was African-American with possibly some German ancestry. Her parents had been slaves in Virginia and were freed after the Civil War. Powell's parents married in West Virginia, where they met. Numerous freedmen had migrated there in the late 19th century for work.
In Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. lived on Sugar Hill at The Garrison Apartments, 435 Convent Avenue, Apartment 3, which had also been his father's home until his death in 1953.
Early career
After ordination, Powell began assisting his father with charitable services at the church and as a preacher. He greatly increased the volume of meals and clothing provided to the needy, and began to learn more about the lives of the working class and poor in Harlem.
During the Great Depression in the 1930s, Powell, a handsome and charismatic figure, became a civil rights leader in Harlem. He recounted these experiences in a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?. He developed a formidable public following in the community through his crusades for jobs and affordable housing. As chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Employment, Powell used numerous methods of community organizing to bring political pressure on major businesses to open their doors to black employees at professional levels. He organized mass meetings, rent strikes, and public campaigns to force companies, utilities, and Harlem Hospital, which operated in the community, to hire black workers at skill levels higher than the lowest positions, to which they had formerly been restricted by informal discrimination.
For instance, during the 1939 New York World's Fair, Powell organized a picket line at the Fair's offices in the Empire State Building. As a result, the Fair hired more black employees, increasing their numbers from about 200 to 732. In 1941, Powell led a bus boycott in Harlem, where blacks constituted the majority of passengers but held few of the jobs; the New York City Transit Authority hired 200 black workers and set the precedent for more. Powell also led a fight to have drugstores operating in Harlem hire black pharmacists. He encouraged local residents to shop only where blacks were also hired to work. "Mass action is the most powerful force on earth", Powell once said, adding, "As long as it is within the law, it's not wrong; if the law is wrong, change the law".
In 1937, Powell succeeded his father as pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church.Brian Stanley, Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History, Princeton University Press, USA, 2019, p. 346. Powell Jr. remained pastor of the church until 1972.
In 1942 he founded People's Voice, a newspaper designed for "a progressive African American audience, and it educated and enlightened readers on everything from local gatherings and events to U.S. civil rights issues to the political and economic struggles of the peoples of Africa. Reporters and writers for the papers included influential African Americans such as Powell himself, Powell's sister-in-law and actress Fredi Washington, and journalist Marvel Cooke." It also served as a mouthpiece for his views. After he was elected to Congress in 1944, other people led the paper, but it finally closed in 1948, after being accused of communist connections.People's Voice, Historical Society of Philadelphia
Political career
New York City Council
In 1941, with the aid of New York City's use of the single transferable vote, Powell was elected to the New York City Council as the city's first black Council member. He received 65,736 votes, the third-best total among the six successful Council candidates, running on the City Fusion and American Labor Party ballot lines. During his tenure, he fought for the city to hire more black policemen and teachers, and to build more schools and playgrounds in black neighborhoods. In 1943, he called for mayor Fiorello La Guardia to be impeached for approving the segregated Stuyvesant Town housing development. After the State Legislature drew New York's 22nd congressional district to be majority-black, Powell declined to run for reelection in 1943 so he could prepare for a congressional campaign. He endorsed black Communist Benjamin J. Davis Jr. to succeed him.
Congress
In 1944, Powell ran for the United States Congress on a platform of civil rights for African Americans: support for "fair employment practices, and a ban on poll taxes and lynching." Requiring poll taxes for voter registration and voting was a device used by southern states in new constitutions adopted from 1890 to 1908 to disenfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, to exclude them from politics.Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000, Accessed March 10, 2008.J. Morgan Kousser. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Poll taxes in the United States, together with the social and economic intimidation of Jim Crow laws, were maintained in the South into the 1960s to keep blacks excluded from politics and politically powerless. Although often associated with states of the former Confederate States of America, poll taxes were also in place in some northern and western states, including California, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Powell was elected as a Democrat and defeated Republican candidate Sara Pelham Speaks to represent the Congressional District that included Harlem."Adam Clayton Powell Jr." , Black Americans in Congress, US House of Representatives, accessed October 24, 2011. He was the first black Congressman elected from New York State.
As the historian Charles V. Hamilton wrote in his 1992 political biography of Powell, Here was a person who [in the 1940s] would at least 'speak out.' ... That would be different ... Many Negroes were angry that no Northern liberals would get up on the floor of Congress and challenge the segregationists. ... Powell certainly promised to do that ...