Monument to an Enormous Ego

...Dial 272 pp $6 95 Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Assistant Professor of History, Douglass College, Rutgers How could it possibly miss7 The autobiography of America's most visceral black leader—the man who exhorted others to "tell it like it is " With his health failing and his public career now behind him, Adam Powell would finally let us know how one man could, with such instinctive virtuosity, play the diverse (and often conflicting) roles of super playboy, Baptist minister, political huckster, progressive reformer, Harlem aristocrat, and militant "street nigger " Unfortunately, Adam does not "let it all hang out", the book is a dud, an evasive, well-packaged ball of fluff reminiscent of the traditional campaign biographies that fill the bookstores every four years At first glance, it might easily be dismissed as a common attempt by a public figure to exploit his own name for profit But a more ticklish problem arises If taken seriously, Adam by Adam may well insure Powell's future anonymity—a fate he neither wants nor deserves Though essentially a monument to Powell's enormous ego, this autobiography is lacking both m candor and self-analysis We learn at the very outset, for example, that his decision to enter the ministry was a product of divine intervention, the fact that he would inherit, from his father, America's most prestigious black congregation had little to do with it "One particular night in 1930," he writes, "I was working late at my desk m my room [at Colgate University] Suddenly there came a voice 'Whom shall I send7 Who will go for me7' And there m that room in that quiet, for the first time in my life God talked to me And ever since, in every way, I've tried to maintain an awareness so that this voice would always be heard " As a young pastor at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, Powell became renowned for his flamboyant attempts to combat poverty, inferior housing, and job discrimination in Harlem His successes are amply documented free soup kitchens in the church gymnasium, well-organized rent strikes, mass marches to city hall calling for reforms at Harlem Hospital But what motivated Powell7 What suddenly increased his sensitivity to the suffering around him7 The answer is quite simple Adam, like Moses, had been chosen to lead his people out of the wilderness "One night early in 1930 there came a knock at [my] door there stood five of the outstanding doctors of the Harlem community 'We need you, a flaming tongue, to fight our battle' [they said] 'What can I do7' I asked Dr Vincent urged, 'You have got to be what Clarence Darrow said Mayor John P Altgeld of Chicago was to the maimed and beaten, the sightless and voiceless1 The eyes and ears, and a flaming tongue crying in the wilderness for kindness and humanity and understanding' something had happened to me The people of the streets, the failures, the misfits, the despised, the maimed, the beaten, the sightless and the voiceless had made a captive of me and I was to know no other love but these people " But what of the other Powell9 Where is the man who showed up on the picket hne long enough to get his picture snapped by the news photographers and then took off, the man who stole the headlines by holding a lone vigil against discriminatory hiring in Harlem after local employers and civic groups had reached a fair settlement, the man who took so much credit for other people's work that Negro reporters m the 1930s dubbed him "the NAAACP"—the National Association for the Advancement of Adam Clayton Powell9 By hiding him away, the book loses far more than it gams—mainly the very qualities that made Adam human Powell's accomphshments, substantial as they are, seem always in need of embellishment We learn that it was Adam who guided every major piece of civil rights legislation through Congress for the past three decades, who insured the appointment of black youths to West Point and Annapolis, who personally convinced Adlai Stevenson to strengthen the Democratic party's civil rights plank in 1952, who attended the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations in 1955, against the wishes of President Eisenhower and the State Department, and personally kept them from going over to the Communist side Adam also gave "an unknown newcomer to Montgomery named Martin Luther King Jr " all the details for his successful bus boycott in 1956, he talked Fidel Castro into discontinuing his public trials and stopping all executions, he straightened out Malcolm X on the true Muslimism The list is endless, as Powell advises Presidents, confers with foreign leaders, inspires a lethargic Congress, or unites a badly fragmented black community No one, but no one, upstages Adam Powell Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is Powell's failure to understand the reasons for his final political defeat He devotes less than two paragraphs to it, concluding only that the election was rigged "Just a rough count showed that my opponent had received over twelve hundred ineligible votes—Republican, Liberal, Conservative, even twenty-seven dead men had faithfully cast their votes for Rangel We uncovered over twelve hundred votes that should not have been counted And I had lost by only a hundred and fifty votes " Yet there was more, so much more As Richard Levine noted in "The End of the Politics of Pleasure" (Harper's, April 1971), Adam Powell represented something that black people desperately wanted m the 1940s and 1950s, but something they could ill afford by the late 1960s He was, in short, the "bad-dest Nigger of them all," a man through whom millions of blacks lived the vicarious experience of the American dream "He became a legend in his tune," wrote Levine, "because he so completely expressed the black man's fundamental ambivalence toward white America, the desire to imitate and defy it at once Powell looked like a white man, yet he lived, not just as a black man, but as the black boogeyman of America's racial nightmare untrustworthy, lazy, spendthrift, and sexually profligate Middle-class Negroes lived comfortably as a reward for good behavior, Powell lived in grand style despite the most outrageous behavior, and seemed invulnerable to punishment " By 1968, however, as issues like urban decay and commumty control took hold in the black ghettoes, Adam Powell was viewed as something of a liability His arrogance toward the white commumty was still understood and respected, but his irresponsibility, his neglect of congressional duties, became more visible with each day spent on the beaches of Birmm In a pathetic attempt to keep in step with the growing militance of his constituency, Powell began to pepper his rhetoric with ugly slurs against "Weak-kneed" Wilkins, "Whitey" Young, and Martin "Loser" King, he invited Black Panthers and Mau Maus to speak from his pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church Mere theatrics were not enough Harlem now needed a dedicated, no-nonsense political leader capable of dealing effectively with its massive social and economic problems Old Adam was simply not the man for the job...