Legacy Issue

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SynerVision Leadership.org I 27
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was one
of the most important figures in
frican American life in the twenti-
eth century, yet he is not well known.
He was a major civil rights leader, and
arguably the most powerful African
American politician of the century. He
was a very bright star whose flame went out
in the early 1970s and now he’s being forgot-
ten.
Powell was born in 1908, the son of Adam
Clayton Powell, Sr., a Baptist minister and
his wife Mattie Buster Shaffer. Soon after,
the family moved to Harlem as Powell, Sr.,
became pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church.
By 1930, the church, with 13,000 members,
was the largest Baptist congregation in the
world. Powell, Jr., received degrees from
Colgate University and Columbia University
and studied ministry at Shaw University. He
succeeded his father as pastor at Abyssinian
Baptist Church in 1937.
Upon returning to Harlem from Colgate in
1930, he launched a career of agitation for
civil rights, jobs, and housing for African
Americans, organizing mass meetings, rent
strikes, and public campaigns that forced
restaurants, bus lines, utilities, telephone
companies, the Harlem Hospital, and others
to change their practices. Stores in Harlem
tended then to be owned by whites who did
not hire blacks, so he led demonstrations
against department stores under the slogan,
“Don’t shop where you can’t work.” They
boycotted until stores placed Harlem Blacks
in hundreds of white-collar jobs.
His community activism led him to win a seat
in the New York City Council in 1941.Three
years later he became the first Black con-
gressman from the state of New York, join-
ing William Dawson of Chicago as the only
African Americans in Congress, although the
moderate Dawson seldom rocked the boat.
Powell became a committee chairperson in
1961 for the House Education and Labor
Committee. Under his leadership, there were
48 major pieces of social legislation, more
pieces of important legislation than any other
committee, embodying President John Ken-
nedy’s “New Frontier” and President Lyndon
Johnson’s “Great Society” programs. Both
presidents thanked Powell.
Some of his greatest works involved passing
legislation to protect the rights of African
Americans ( Jim Crow laws): bills to
criminalize lynching, enhance public school
desegregation, and abolish the practice of
charging a poll tax to Black voters. Powell
attached the Powell Amendment to every
bill that came before his committee, calling
for a discontinuance of federal funds to
any organization which practiced racial
discrimination, occasionally holding up bills
until the Powell Amendment was included.
The debonair minister/politician made many
enemies in Congress with his persistent
pushing for civil rights, and he gave them
ammunition which they readily used against
him. In 1966-67, his House colleagues
censured him, stripped him of his
seniority, and eventually voted him out
of office. The charge was using federal
funds to take women staffers on trips
and vacations with him, keying on one
in particular, a former Miss Ohio, who
did not seem to have a real set of tasks
in his office. He was voted back into office in
1968 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
the House acted unconstitutionally when
they unseated Powell. Voted out of office in
1970, he retired to Bimini in the Bahamas.
In 1972, Powell’s health faltered, and he was
rushed from Bimini to a hospital in Miami
where he died from acute prostatitis. Public
schools have been named for him, as has
an office building in Harlem, and there is
an Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Boulevard
in Harlem. His real legacy, however, is his
sassiness as a confident political figure in
an era when many African Americans were
afraid to speak out against the racism and
poverty that they saw.
Wornie Reed, PhD, is professor of Sociology and
Africana Studies, and director of the Race and Social
Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech. He previously
developed and directed social science research centers
at three other universities and led the National Congress
of Black Faculty and the National Association of Black
Sociologists. Honors and awards include two Regional
Television Emmys for his work with Public Health
Television, Inc., on the Urban Cancer Project, which
produced television shows aimed at African Americans
on cancer prevention.
Adam Clayton Powell
A Major African American Leader
wOrNiE rEED