The term “black civil-rights leader” has acquired a bad name over the last few decades – and deservedly so. This political type cannot accept the fact that his mission effectively was accomplished decades ago. Thus, he prefers to stoke the fires of collective grievance so as to retain his audiences and his sense of importance.
Knowing how to identify and defeat targets, and form “partnerships” with the vanquished – and under the guise of a national “conversation” on race – is a fine art. High practitioners such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond have few peers when it comes to instilling anger in black audiences and fearful shame in white ones. But even they could take a few refresher lessons from the man instrumental in getting the ball rolling some 70 years ago, the late Harlem clergyman and Congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the charismatic Powell, born on November 29, 1908. He’s been the subject of several biographies and a Showtime cable TV network film. As much as Martin Luther King Jr., he left an indelible stamp on the way people in this country think about race.
A hero to millions of blacks, in an out of New York, Adam Clayton Powell had extensive white ancestry on both sides of his family. Indeed, at first glance it was easy to mistake him for Caucasian. During his youth, many people did. Yet like so many light-skinned blacks – think of Julian Bond, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama – his sense that his blackness was a hindrance to social advancement proved a radicalizing experience. Powell harbored mistrust of whites and outright contempt for black “Uncle Toms” who took orders from them. Whether you loved Adam Clayton Powell or hated him, he made sure of one thing: You never saw him taking orders. That swagger eventually would rub off on a certain preadolescent boy who one day would come to define America’s race relations more than anyone else. But I digress.
It was the Great Depression. Powell, holder of a master’s degree in theology from Columbia University, was furious that New York’s blacks lacked economic opportunity. He came to chair a local group known as the Coordinating Committee for Employment. Through this entity, he organized mass meetings, rent strikes, and boycotts against white employers. The committee delivered results, not just rhetoric. When he organized a picket line at the 1939 New York World’s Fair executive offices at the Empire State Building, management quickly increased the number of black employees from around 200 to more than 700. In the early Forties, he led a boycott of the city transit authority, which prompted the authority to hire 200 black employees. He also successfully pressured white-owned drug stores into hiring black pharmacists.
Powell didn’t engage in violence, but he wasn’t above providing cover for it either. In the aftermath of the deadly 1935 Harlem riot, he wrote several published articles as to its causes, citing “the injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and the racial segregation.” He expressed similar sentiments following another Harlem riot in 1943.
What made Powell, like so many other civil-rights leaders, doubly effective was his religious conviction. His father, Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., was lead pastor at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. In 1937, he would inherit the position. His apprenticeship had prepared him well. Soon he was addressing overflow audiences in measured tones of anger, eloquence and piety.
Politics seemed a logical next step. In 1941, he was elected to the New York City Council as its first black representative. In 1944, he ran as a Democrat for Congress, post-riot redistricting having created a seat tailor-made for Harlem. He easily won election, the first of many victories. One of two black congressman (the other was William Dawson of Chicago), Powell broke with tradition in ways that aided and undermined the cause of liberty. He led efforts to desegregate the military, outlaw lynching and ban the use of racially-motivated poll taxes. At the same time, he was a key architect of the welfare state, especially starting in 1961 when he became chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Under his direction, the committee approved literally dozens of bills that eventually were signed into law. Powell could lay claim to making possible a large portion of President Kennedy’s New Frontier and President Johnson’s Great Society.
Powell always found time to come home and speak from the pulpit at his Abyssinian Baptist Church. Among his audiences was an 11-year-old boy from Brooklyn, Al Sharpton, Jr. Born in 1954, young Al already had been preaching since age 4 at the Temple of God in Christ in Queens, N.Y.; by 10, he would be ordained a Pentecostal minister by the church’s pastor, the Reverend F. D. Washington. The “wonder-boy preacher” had quite a local following, too; he already had been an opening act for gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Sharpton idolized Powell. He recalls the first encounter:
I’ll never forget to this day the first time I actually laid eyes on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He walked out of the side door into the sanctuary in his robe, with that straight, long posture. He walked up those marble stairs to the semicircular pulpit. I thought I had seen God….He had this magnetism and this majestic air. He was very elegant, but at the same time defiant – a real man’s man.
After the sermon, Sharpton screwed up the courage to seek a personal meeting. After persistent pleading with Powell’s secretary, he met his idol face to face. To his surprise, Powell recognized him, exclaiming, “Alfred Sharpton! Boy preacher from Brooklyn.” The Congressman, it turned out, was a fan of Reverend Washington’s radio program. It was the start of a long friendship.
Al Sharpton learned many lessons from Adam Clayton Powell, all right. The problem is that they weren’t necessarily the right ones. Continued... |