Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.

Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. (May 5, 1865 – June 12, 1953) was an American pastor who developed the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York as the largest Protestant congregation in the country, with 10,000 members. He was a community activist, author, and the father of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Born into poverty in southwestern Virginia, Powell worked to put himself through school and Wayland Seminary, where he was ordained in 1892.

After serving in churches in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New Haven, Connecticut, Powell was called as pastor to Abyssinian Baptist, where he served from 1908-1936, during the Great Migration of blacks out of the rural South, when Harlem became the center of African-American life in New York. During his tenure, he managed the purchase of land and the construction of a larger church and facilities from congregational tithing. He was a founder of the National Urban League, active in the NAACP and several fraternal organizations, and served as trustee of several historically black colleges and schools.

Background

Adam Clayton Powell was born near Martin's Mill on Maggodee Creek, in Franklin County, Virginia. This was in the Piedmont, above the fall line of the Roanoke River. His mother Sally Dunning (b. 1842-1848-d. ?), a free woman of color, named her first son after her older brother Adam Dunning. He headed the family as a farmer. In 1860 she was living with her mother, aunt Mary, and large family, including her grandmother Hannah; all the family were free mulattoes. Powell wrote in his autobiography that his mother never told him who his father was. He described her mother, Mildred Dunning (later listed as Malinda Dunnon, in the 1880 census), as "mostly Indian." Mildred was still living with her daughter and family past 1880, so he knew her well. Powell showed his partial European ancestry, as he was fair and blue-eyed. Two years after Adam's birth, in 1867 his mother Sally married Anthony Bush (b. abt. 1845-d. 1937), a mulatto freedman (former slave). In the 1870 census, he used the surname Dunning, as did his and Sally's children.

J. Daniel Pezzoni, a preservation consultant, noted in 1995 there was a local tradition linking Powell's family to Llewellyn Powell, a white planter who had property 10 miles away at Hale's Ford, but there was no documentary evidence for this. Wil Haygood, a 1993 biographer of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., mistakenly wrote that Sally Dunning was held as a slave by Llewellyn Powell at the time of her son Adam's birth, and asserted Powell was the father. Pezzoni noted Sally was a free woman of color, as were her mother and grandmother, proved by the 1860 census, which documented the three generations of the Dunning family.

Both Sally's mother and grandmother were free; by Virginia's principle of partus sequitur ventrem in slave law, all of their children were free. The Encyclopaedia of African American History (2006) claims that Powell's father was Llewellyn Powell, and that he was of German descent. Note: Both Llewellyn and Powell are names associated primarily with Wales and England rather than Germany.

By 1880 the Dunning family had moved to Cabin Creek, Kanawha County, West Virginia, and taken new identities. Anthony, his wife and children took the surname Powell. Sally's mother Mildred Dunning took the name Malinda Dunnon. There was a growing African-American community in the Kanawha Valley, attracted to jobs in mills and in coal production. In 1880 Anthony Powell worked at the dam; Adam Powell at age 15 worked hauling water at the mines, and Malinda Dunnon worked as a weaver. Anthony reared Adam as his stepson, and he and Sally had several children together.

Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. identified as black in the South and in his life, but later in life easily passed as white for his convenience when traveling by train in the South; he used it to gain better accommodations in the segregated railroad cars. In a 2010 article on the racial identities of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. and his father, Lawrence Rushing, a social scientist, notes that the senior Powell had no documented African ancestry other than the census classification of his mother and her family as mulatto. He suggested that mulatto could be an indeterminate term, and that Powell had chosen his identity rather than identifying as white. Historically, the term was primarily used to refer to someone of mixed African and European ancestry.

Education

Powell worked through college and graduated in 1892 from Wayland Seminary, a historically black college located in Washington, DC. (It was the predecessor school of Virginia Union University). He attended Yale Divinity School (1895–1896) and earned a D.D. at Virginia Union University (1904).

He was later made an honorary member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

Marriage

On 30 June 1889, Powell married Mattie Shaffer (née Mattie Buster) of Pratt, West Virginia. She was the daughter of the mulattoes Samuel Buster and his wife Eliza (née Wilson), who were both farm laborers. (Eliza changed her and her daughter's surname to Shaffer after divorcing Buster.) They had two children: Blanche F. Powell (b. 1898; d. 1926) and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (b. 1908; d. 1972). Before 1920, Blanche married Clarence D. King, who had migrated to New York from Virginia, and the young couple lived with her parents for a time.

Career

Powell was ordained a Baptist minister in 1892; he served at churches in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New Haven, Connecticut between 1892 and 1908.

From 1908 until 1936, Powell served as pastor of the century-old Abyssinian Baptist Church, whose congregation had moved north and was located in Harlem, New York. Under his leadership, in 1920 the congregation acquired a large lot and built a substantial church and community center at a cost of $334,000. With the increase in the black population to New York during the twentieth century's Great Migration, Powell ultimately attracted a membership of 10,000 at Abyssinian, the largest Protestant membership in the country.

He had widespread influence in the community. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor, attended Abyssinian Baptist for six months while studying in New York at Union Theological Seminary before World War II. He was greatly influenced by the preaching, social work and the Black spiritual music of the congregation.

Powell was active in a variety of educational institutions and community organizations; he was among the founders of the National Urban League; a trustee of Virginia Union University, Downington Industrial and Agricultural School in Pennsylvania, which operated until 1993; the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC; and the White Rose Industrial Home in New York, all historically black colleges and schools. He was a member of the YMCA, Republican Party, and fraternal organizations, including the Masons, Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias.

Powell's son, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., succeeded his father as pastor at the church in 1937 after working with him for several years as an assistant.

Burial

Powell is buried at Flushing Cemetery, Flushing, Queens, New York City, New York.

See also

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Works

• Powell, A. Clayton Sr., Against the Tide: An Autobiography, (New York: Richard B. Smith, 1938)

Pamphlets

• "Some Rights Not Denied the Negro"
• "The Significance of the Hour"
• "A Plea for Strong Manhood"
• "A Three-Fold Cord"

References

• Powell, A. Clayton Sr., Against the Tide: An Autobiography, (New York: Richard B. Smith, 1938)
• Rushing, Lawrence, "The Racial Identity of Adam Clayton Powell Jr: A Case Study in Racial Ambivalence and Redefinition", Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 1 January 2010
• Finkelman, Paul (editor). Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century.
• Hamilton, Charles V. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.: The Political Biography of an American Dilemma, New York: Atheneum, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991
• Haygood, Wil. King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., 1993; reprint, HarperCollins, 2006
• Mather, Frank Lincoln. Who's Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent, Vol. 1, Chicago: Memento Edition, 1915, p. 222
• Pezzoni, J. Daniel. "Hook-Powell-Moorman Farm": Historic Nomination Form, US Department of the Interior, 1995
• Powell, A. Clayton Sr., Against the Tide: An Autobiography, (New York: Richard B. Smith, 1938)
• Yenser, Thomas (editor), Who's Who in Colored America: A Biographical Dictionary of Notable Living Persons of African Descent in America, Who's Who in Colored America, Brooklyn, New York, 1930-1931-1932 (Third Edition)