Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was born on the twenty-ninth of November 1908 at New Haven, Connecticut, the son of the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. — the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Harlem from 1908 until 1937 and one of the most prominent Black Baptist preachers of the early twentieth century — and Mattie Fletcher Schaefer Powell. The family moved to Harlem in 1908. He was educated at the Townsend Harris High School at Manhattan and at Colgate University, taking the bachelor's at Colgate in 1930. He took the Master of Religious Education at Columbia in 1932 and was ordained at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1930. He succeeded his father as pastor of Abyssinian in 1937 at twenty-eight.

He led from the pulpit and from the streets the Don't Buy Where You Can't Work campaign of 1933 — which forced the rehiring of the Harlem Hospital Black medical staff fired during the Depression — and the 1939 New York World's Fair employment-discrimination campaign. He was elected in 1941 to the New York City Council as the first African American member. In November 1944 he was elected the first African American Representative from the State of New York to the United States House.

He served in the House for twelve consecutive terms across the following twenty-six years. He served as chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor from 1961 to 1967. The committee under his chairmanship reported out — by Lawrence O'Brien's later White House count — fifty Great Society laws across six years, including the Manpower Development and Training Act of 1962, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1965, and the Adult Education Act of 1966. President Johnson described him in the Oval Office tapes as the most consequential committee chairman of the Eighty-Ninth Congress.

He was excluded by vote of the House on the first of March 1967 on grounds of misuse of committee funds. The Supreme Court restored him to his seat in Powell v. McCormack on the sixteenth of June 1969. He served the remaining year and a half of his term but lost the 1970 primary to Charles Rangel.

He died at Miami on the fourth of April 1972, at sixty-three.

He is honored here as the legislative architect of the Great Society.