Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 4
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
July/August 1992 | Volume 43, Issue 4
On summer evenings toward the end of his life, Robert Todd Lincoln liked to be driven up the road from Hildene, his home in Manchester, Vermont, to the Equinox House for dinner. It was a charming resort hotel, marred for the old man only by the black bellboys who hurried out to open the door of his RollsRoyce. The Emancipator’s son had come to dislike blacks, and, when any dared touch his gleaming door handle, he angrily rapped their knuckles with his cane. To keep Mr. Lincoln happy, the manager paid one youth, light-skinned enough to pass for white, ten extra dollars a week just to meet his limousine. Lincoln was said to be so pleased to be greeted by an apparently white servant that he tipped him an additional silver dollar every time he was ushered into the hotel.
The lucky bellboy was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who gleefully recounted the story in his 1971 autobiography, Adam by Adam. As Charles V. Hamilton’s solid, balanced life Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma demonstrates, this was just the first of many times that Powell would profit from the special lunacy of race relations in America. It would be part of his appeal to his black constituents all his life that he had deliberately chosen to identify himself with them rather than with the whites among whom he might have lived in greater ease.
He was brought up as the pampered son of the most influential man in Harlem, the Reverend Adam Powell, Sr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose pulpit he would one day inherit as his own. A frail, beautiful, goldenhaired little boy, he was doted upon by his parents, his older sister, and the ladies of his father’s congregation. That rarefied upbringing armed him with a brash self-confidence that stayed with him almost to the end, but it also rendered him perennially delighted at his own naughtiness, unhappy whenever the spotlight shifted from him even for a moment, and unable finally to distinguish between his own cause and that of the dispossessed people who believed in him.
He first rose to prominence in the 1930s, leading boycotts and picketing campaigns; persuading churchgoers, Communists, and black nationalists all to march together; forcing small but symbolically important job concessions for blacks from city bus companies, Macy’s, Gimbels, New York Telephone, the 1939 world’s fair.
He became the first black to serve on the City Council, in 1941, and when redistricting made it possible for a black to represent Harlem three years later, he won both the Democratic and Republican primaries and then was elected unopposed, the first AfricanAmerican congressman ever elected from a Northeastern state. He would be re-elected 12 times.
During the Truman and Elsenhower administrations he served as a relentless, self-styled “irritant,” lashing the leaders of both parties for their failure to deliver on civil rights, and attaching to