The Political Biography of an American Dilemma
A glance through the index of this attractive volume suggests that Charles V. Hamilton has written not only the definitive biography of a great American Democrat but a history of twentieth-century American politics as well. The Prologue, "An American Dilemma and a Political Career," opens with a factual statement: that Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was elected to Congress in 1944, the same year that Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal published his classical work, An American Dilemma. Both Myrdal and Powell understood that the dilemma of African-Americans resided in the fact that, both in law and in practice, the U.S.A. has traditionally said one thing and practiced another where its Negro citizens were concerned.
This moral dilemma is what made Powell's brand of leadership appropriate as during WW II when he called attention to injustices here and abroad. In some quarters Powell's eccentricities of character and style hampered response to his cry for freedom. Any biography of Powell, then, must of necessity be a political biography, and Hamilton has published the best of its kind since Addison Gayle's volume on Richard Wright.
The Introduction, consisting of two chapters, "The Fall from Power: Double Standard or Due Punishment?" and "Born to Privilege and Pampering," begins in medias res with Powell's exclusion in 1967 by Congress and the events from that point that marked him as a "bellwether of sorts" of American politics. Once the reader is throughly involved, the more personal aspects of Powell 's life from his birth in 1908 at New Haven, the second child of the elder Powell and the former Mattie Fletcher, to their move a few months later to Harlem, when the elder Powell accepted the pastorate of the famed Abyssinnian Baptist congregation.
Hamilton has the precise background for producing the present time for he has drawn from his experiences with previous books: Black Power with Stokely Carmichael (1967), and The Black Preacher in America (1973), among other books and periodical publications. The present biography is the culmination of research on Powell begun immediately after his death in 1972. Almost twenty years in process, the style of this book is Hamilton as storyteller with an unobtrusive sense of chronology. The reader appreciates his anecdotes about the flamboyant politician's apocryphal tales of his genealogy and of the anomalies of race and class in America.
This exhaustive political biography focuses on the three most significant decades of Powell's public service, the '40s, '50s, and '60s. Part one, "The Pulpit and Protest, 1930s and '40s," treats the Depression years leading to World War II and the year 1944, the turning point in Powell's life toward a brilliant career in both the pulpit and political arena. Harlem, in the "stroiling '30s," was still "in vogue." There was optimism among the AfricanAmerican masses that by 1935 had begun to sour with the S. H. Kress incident and the riots that ensued.
Powell accepted the challenge of exposing the weaknesses of Harlem's health systems, of New York's economic and political inequities, capturing the hearts of those he would represent and lead over the next three decades in public office. His acecdotal style persisted and became sprinkled with ghetto speech and the intonations of the black preacher, a flavoring Langston Hughes was fond of using in his creative works. Powell threatened: White Folks in the Lead," but "Keep the Faith, Baby!" Prophetically he warned America of the violence that would eventually erupt, the result of deep-seated resentment and insecurity within the country's largest ghettos. He knew with Myrdal that discrimination in one field has its ramifications in all other fields of "Negro life." In his sermons, speeches and journalistic articles, he did not spare the Black Church, nor did he spare his fellow black ministers.
The darkest days of the Great Depression, a "Valley of Decision" to parallel Jehosaphat's, would become the proving ground of a long and fruitful career.
Part two, "Congressional Irritant, 1940s and 1950s," shows the Democrat puffing his never-absent cigar, and rising to a win over Earl Brown and Tammany Hall in the 1958 Congressional race, closing the decade of the '60s by forging an auspicious friendship with John F. Kennedy.
Part Three, "Power and Paradox, 1 960s, " examines his life with Hazel Scott and his many political triumphs, a period marred only by Scott's divorcing him.
At his funeral in 1972 were Hazel Scott and her son, his third wife Yvette Diago and her son; and on the front row seat, not unlike the "vamp" Hattie at the funeral of Moderator Alf Pearson in Zora Hurston's 1 934-first-novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, the woman that he was living with in Bimini when he was stricken.
The narrative has never a dull time as Hamilton documents the Powell legacy which, despite his maverick's style, and partly because of it, was inimitable.
Hamilton has written, without partiality and without partisanship, an outstanding monument to that brand of African-American individuality of which Powell is America's finest example.
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