Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was an American Baptist clergyman.
Background
He was born on May 5, 1865 in Martin's Mill, Franklin County, Virginia, United States, the son of a German planter killed during the Civil War, before his son's birth, and a Negro-Indian woman named Sally. He knew his natural father only as "Powell. " His recently freed mother was taken into the cabin of Anthony Dunn, a former slave of Powell's father, who was sharecropping on the land of Albert Martin.
In 1875 the family migrated to West Virginia to work on a farm across the Kanawha River, and a year later they settled at Paint Creek, where Dunn worked on a lock and dam then under construction.
Education
Powell attended school for two years in Paint Creek; with the year's schooling at Martin's Mill, this completed his formal grammar school education.
In 1888 he was admitted to both the normal/academic and the theological departments of Wayland Seminary in Washington (now part of Virginia Union University); he graduated from both departments. He was a special student at Yale Divinity School (1895 - 1896).
Career
In 1884 Powell fled Paint Creek, having been involved in a shooting incident with a prominent white citizen while employed as the guard of a melon patch. He found work in the W. P. Rend coal mines in Rendville, Ohio, and was living a profligate life, but in March 1885 he was dramatically converted at a revival meeting and shortly thereafter determined to pursue a career in the law and in politics, with the ultimate objective of being elected to Congress. Unable to enter the Howard University Law School because of his limited academic background, Powell worked for a time in Howard House, a Washington hotel.
In September 1893, following short-lived pastorates at the Pilgrim Baptist Church in St. Paul, Minnesote, and at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Philadelphia, Powell was called to the pulpit of the Emanuel Baptist Church in New Haven, Connecticut. By December 1908, when he left Emanuel to assume the pastorate of the centuryold Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, he had cleared its indebtedness, enlarged its membership, installed an organ, and been widely involved in religious and racial causes in New Haven, including interdenominational and interracial cooperative efforts. In 1900 he was a delegate to the World's Christian Endeavour Convention in London.
After the war he was an organizer of the Silent Protest Parade and used his church as a base from which to protest the events of the Red Scare of 1919. In 1923, at Powell's insistence, the Abyssinian congregation completed a move uptown to 138th Street in Harlem.
Powell retired in 1937 but remained active as a speaker, writer, and Harlem community leader. He died in New York City.
Achievements
Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was without question among the most successful and the most widely known black clergymen in New York City. He developed the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York as the largest Protestant congregation in the United States. It was especially effective during the Great Depression, when under his administration the Church offered food, housing, job counseling, and clothing to needy persons. Besides, Powell was a founder of the Urban League and a member of the first board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A long-time Republican, Powell shifted his allegiance to Franklin D. Roosevelt after the election of 1932, but subsequently became more a supporter of the American Labor Party. Powell was a prominent race leader. Initially his views were consistent with those of Booker T. Washington, but he moderated them in the direction of those advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois. He was liberal in his social thought and recognized the importance of political influence in dealing with social issues.
He initially opposed World War I, but later became convinced that it would advance the citizenship rights of blacks. The discriminatory policies of the military and the regressive racial policies of the Wilson administration, however, caused him to shift his views once again.
Views
He preached the gospel of race pride and the "black is good" philosophy. He argued for the value of the "double-duty dollar" - that is, that blacks should spend their money where it not only would provide for their needs but also would contribute to the social and political advancement of their race.
Personality
Tall and fair-skinned, Powell was a man of impressive appearance and imposing presence who preached with evangelical fervor and power. He had talents in organizational and business matters. He was theologically conservative, a teetotaler, opposed to smoking, cardplaying, dancing, and theatergoing.
Connections
In 1890 he married Mattie Fletcher Shaffer (or Schaefer), his childhood sweetheart. She was the daughter of a Negro-Indian woman who was the housekeeper of Colonel Jacob Schaefer of the brewing family. They had two children.
His wife died in 1945, and shortly afterward he married Inez Cottrell, a nurse who was some years his junior.
