biography
| name: |
Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr
|
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1908–72)
|
| biography:
| US representative and minister, born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He studied at Columbia University, and became minister at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church (1931). He was elected to New York's City Council in 1941, and served as a Democrat in the US House of Representatives (1945–69), where he fought to outlaw Jim Crow laws, and became chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor (1960–7). His absentee rate and eight-year legal battle with a Harlem woman who sued him for libel lost him support in Congress. When he moved to Bimini in 1966 to escape payment, the House voted to exclude him from Congress. After paying libel charges, he returned in 1969, vindicated by a Supreme Court decision that his exclusion had been invalid; however, he was defeated in 1970 by Charles Rangel. |
|
|
