For one thing, Powell misused his office for private gain.  He beat a tax evasion rap in 1960, but evidence suggested he had lucked out.  He also enjoyed the good life, regularly shuttling between Washington and his vacation home in Bimini, the Bahamas.  Living well wasn’t illegal.  But paying for pleasure out of committee funds was.  After a lengthy probe, Powell’s colleagues concluded he had done just that.  The House of Representatives’ Democratic Caucus in January 1967 stripped him of his chairmanship, and two months later, the full House voted 307-116 to exclude him. 

His seat now vacant, Powell campaigned the following month in a special election to get it back.  He won, but his colleagues disallowed him from taking his seat.  Powell promptly sued to rescind that decision, eventually winning in the Supreme Court in June 1969, after winning re-election the previous November.  Powell left his self-imposed Bimini exile and returned to Congress, minus seniority.  But his career would be short-lived.  In the 1970 Democratic primary, he lost by a razor-thin margin to upstart Charles Rangel, who to this day holds the Harlem seat.  Two years later, Powell died of acute prostatitis.

Powell’s ethical lapses couldn’t have sent the right signals to Sharpton, who has demonstrated a propensity for similar behavior.  In the spring of 2004, the Federal Election Commission ruled that Sharpton had to return $100,000 in election matching funds that he raised for his presidential campaign and that he was ineligible for another nearly $80,000 in extra funds.  Related to that campaign, about 10 of his employees and associates in December 2007 received subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury.  And this past May, authorities announced that he and affiliated groups owed a combined $1.5 million in federal, state and city back taxes and penalties.  His response:  “Whatever retaliation they do on me, we never stop.  I think that is why they try to intimidate us.”   

But a more lasting mark of Powell’s influence on Al Sharpton was a loathing of moderation as a political style and as a set of beliefs.  Sharpton writes:  “What I learned from Powell about leadership…is that you can’t care what people think.  Adam Clayton Powell did not care about being accepted by society.”  In a defining moment, Sharpton recalls advice Powell gave him during a car ride:

“Kid…Don’t ever forget this:  If you expose your own weaknesses, they can never use them against you.  ‘Cause can’t nobody tell what everybody already knows.  What might appear to be reckless behavior on my part is really defense.  They can never threaten to expose me, because I expose myself.

And not long before his death, Powell conveyed these words of wisdom to his understudy: 

These yellow Uncle Toms are taking over the blacks in New York.  Don’t you stop fighting.  If you want to do something for Adam, get rid of these Uncle Toms.

Sharpton never forgot those words – or the desire for payback against whites whenever the opportunity arose.  He doesn’t apologize for any of his public incitements, whether in Crown Heights, Howard Beach or the streets of Harlem in front of Freddie’s Fashion Mart.  White folks, he bitterly complains, “are asking me to grovel.  They want black children to say that they forced a black man coming out of the hardcore ghetto to his knees.”  Actually, a little contrition would do just fine.

The civil-rights movement of today thrives on intimidating whites and manipulating emotions of blacks.  The forebodings of blood flowing in the streets if Barack Obama loses to John McCain this Tuesday are a legacy of a political style whose prime exemplar is Al Sharpton.  It’s important to know that he had an excellent early teacher.