Nearly 115 years ago, the late great Black New York Congressperson Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. , from Harlem, was born. The son of the pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, Adam the younger was born on November 29, 1908, in New Haven, Connecticut.
After graduating from high school in the New York City borough of Queens, he enrolled in Hamilton College in central New York. He was a brother of Alpha Phi Alpha Black fraternity, which had been founded at Cornell University in 1906.
Other notables during the Powell central New York era include Syracuse alumni jazzman Henry Bryant, his wife Gladys, who was Harriet Tubman’s grandniece, artist and New York Times art educator Elton Fax and civil rights attorney Conrad Lynn.
Powell earned a Hamilton College bachelor’s degree in 1930. He went on to earn a religion master’s degree from Columbia University. In 1934 he earned a doctor of divinity degree at Shaw University.
Following in his father’s career path, he was ordained a Baptist minister. In 1937 he became pastor of his father’s church. Sadly, his father would die in 1953.
The tug of politics earned him a seat on the New York City Council in 1941. As a Democrat, in 1944 Adam Clayton Powell won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
He was the first African American elected to serve there from New York State or any northeast state. He served there longer than any Black congress member, breaking the five-term record of sailor and Civil War hero Robert Smalls.
In Congress, the Harlem legislator was formidable. With his seniority, he ascended to chair of the House Education and Labor committee, one of the the most powerful in Congress, because of its control of a big portion of the Federal budget.
A traditional integrationist, Chair Powell blocked Federal money to segregated school districts, incurring the wrath of racists nationwide. He regularly added “the Powell Amendment” to spending bills, blocking federal funding to discriminatory entities and projects.
With his light features, he could pass for white. There is no evidence that he tried to.
In 1945 he married obviously Black jazz pianist Hazel Scott, his second wife, and together they had Adam III. With her music fame and his political stature, they enjoyed favorable coverage in New York and national African American media. Eventually, they divorced in 1960.
In collaboration with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis and other social justice powerhouses, Congressperson Powell crafted language for the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed it into law on July 3, ending official Jim Crow segregation in America.
And back in Harlem, the member of Congress became pastor of Abyssinian Baptist church, which his father had built into the nation’s largest Baptist church.
The activist inside of the legislator drove him to lead boycotts of Harlem merchants that profited from a mostly Black clientele, which was blocked nonetheless from job opportunities that were reserved for whites.
Also fed up with police corruption in his district, Adam Clayton Powell made the mistake of naming Esther James as the “bag woman” who was delivering police bribes. She sued him and won, precipitating his downfall. He also wrestled with corruption accusations at this time.
His congressional privileges in cat and mouse chases enabled his avoidance of some legal accountability by a member of Congress. He appeared in New York only on Sundays to avoid arrest for contempt of court charges for not paying his slander loss.
Eventually, Congressperson Powell was denied his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1967. This time he sued and won. In 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered him seated. More good news; he remarried and fathered Adam lV. And fishing in waters off of Bimini, Bahamas, brought him great satisfaction.
But, the ferocity of his younger years was gone, as was his lock on uptown politics in New York. In 1967 Mr. Powell was removed as chair of Labor and Education. One of his protégés, Charles Rangel, ran against him in 1970, and won the seat. That was when I last voted for Congressperson Adam Clayton Powell. (In his own rise to power, Charles Rangel entangled himself later in a federal tax scandal).
Failing health dogged Mr. Powell in his final years on Earth. Adam Clayton Powell died in Miami on December 4, 1972. He was an American original.
Robert Hill is an award-winning Pittsburgh writer and communications consultant. His previous article was “Saving white Europeans in 1940 and 2022-23.”
First Published: February 28, 2023, 5:00 a.m.
