The Great Depression; Interview with Adam Clayton Powell III. Part 2

, In the early 30s, I'm sorry, I'll start again. Around this time in the early 30s, we have a newly elected president, Franklin Roosevelt, newly elected mayor, Firao LaGuardia, both elected with broad, liberal, progressive coalitions. But once Roosevelt and LaGuardia got into office and had to govern, pieces of those coalitions didn't always see things the same way, and the friction, the disagreements between my father and LaGuardia and between my father and Roosevelt really centered on how these

elements of the progressive coalition, once their candidate was elected, proceeded to go in different directions. In the Triboral Bridge, one of the key constituencies for LaGuardia and Roosevelt for that matter were the trade unions. But quite often, the trade unions would be obstacles to hiring more black workers. And so suddenly you have this progressive coalition now debating and fighting within itself over just how progressive they were really going to be. And that was a debate which kept going out of tension, which keeps going to this day. But in the early 30s, when you had these newly elected progressive leaders, particularly in New York City, there was an element of disappointment, it's too mild a word, a frustration

that all right, now we have our progressive man and office in City Hall and in the White House, where are the jobs? Where is the money? And people could see every day in the newspaper that multi-million dollar programs were enacted and millions of dollars are flowing into New York City and thousands of jobs are being created, but in Harlem you turn around and ask, where are they? Why haven't they come north of Central Park? And that central tension really wasn't resolved until World War II when there was so much money and so much work that there was prosperity throughout the country. Much of that tension and frustration comes to an end with the 1935 riot, March 19th.

You remember in conversation with your father and regard to him, trying to warn the border about the tensions and the frustrations that existed there, or him talking about the border coming there, or not coming there, or is totally ignoring Harlem, just that whole situation. There was a tension there, my father's nickname, that's impossible to cut, let me start again, my father's nickname was Flaming Tongue and he had heard that people in City Hall and LaGuardia administration were very wary of this minister up in Harlem that he could arouse people, he could bring them down by the subway to City Hall, have a big rally on the steps of City Hall, things were difficult, everyone knew times were tough, who knows what this young minister, this brass young man might do, this Flaming Tongue of his.

So when he came downtown and talked to LaGuardia and warned about the difficulty of conditions, the frustrations, and how really the conditions were right for a major, major problem in Harlem to suddenly erupt, what he heard back was, yes we know times are tough, but you may be part of the problem, because you're stirring up those people, and so you could just imagine what some of those private meetings were like, and we now can see some of the private correspondents within the LaGuardia administration and between LaGuardia and my father, where there was a great deal of mistrust by the LaGuardia people, what is Powell up to, and there was certainly mistrust on the part of my father, why isn't City Hall dealing with this? It's almost if they were talking in different dialects of the same language, yes it was

the same language, but different dialects. When the riots happened, the spark was a familiar one to us today, it was the rumors, inaccurate as it turned out, to be rumors of a boy having been beaten in a store. It happened very quickly. My father's word, which he told to me later, to LaGuardia, was, I told you, this was coming, you've got to address this, you've got to come up here and do something about this. Some of the people around LaGuardia, even before the mayor responded, would say things like, well it's the communists, it's the radicals, maybe it's Powell, because after all,

maybe it's in his interest to stir things up like this. But there was so much damage and so much destruction up and down 125th Street in a very short period of time that the city had to respond, and it was clear that it was, in the term that was used then, a race riot. You had store owners putting up signs in their windows trying to keep their windows from being broken and trying to prevent looting. Someone was putting up huge signs saying, this store run by colored people, or early on, this store employs colored people. Even some of the Chinese had signs up where colored too. This all sounds like it could be out of today's headlines, but this was the 1930s in New

York, and it was very clearly a split along racial lines, but it was also very much a split along economic lines, the money and the programs designed to combat the poverty of the depression simply had not filtered through into Harlem to help the people in Harlem. To the right, the Gloria comes to Harlem and tries to enlist your father's support, you come see your father's church, and you talk to me about that, and your father's response to him. I was waiting till the phone stops. I don't remember my father discussing his public response to the Gloria, that's a matter that's on the record anyway, but his weariness about City Hall continued, especially as the

negotiations. Now you're getting into the years when the political negotiations are beginning, the political forces are beginning to come together that will eventually create a city council seat, which my father would occupy, and then not long after that, a congressional district in Harlem. So there was a weariness that continued, probably matched by LaGuardia, that yes, let's try to work together and do something, but who knows what he's really up to, how long this commitment's going to last, things are going to quiet down, and then what'll happen. So the struggle isn't over yet, and the struggle isn't going to be over for a while, we'll see how long our, what was his phrase, how long our campaign friends will be with us. That was a phrase campaign friends that he used for years, they're your friends when

they're running for office, they come up here and they campaign, then you don't see them again, where are they, they're downtown somewhere, but they'll be back for the next campaign. Must be for you. It's the following, you know. You can hit DND, I think it's the second button from the top, which cuts that off. Now, we're still rolling, still rolling, after the riot, there's a commission, a blue ribbon commission or panel or whatever that's formed, it come back with a report that tells the gaudy of many of the things that your father had been telling them. He holds a report, he wouldn't publish it, right? Tell me about that report. Well the report, which was held confidential and wasn't published until the newspaper got hold of it and published it. Tell me, I mean, make it inclusive, I mean, you have to tell me that the report after the riot.

Oh, I see, right, yes, okay. After the riot, the mayor convened a commission, a commission investigated the causes of the riot and produced a report on the Harlem riot. The mayor decided not to publish the report, but to keep it secret and it remained secret until a newspaper was able to get it and publish it sometime later. My father's view was that there was nothing surprising in the report. In fact, there was nothing in the report that LaGuardia hadn't been told before the riot. The conditions were bad in Harlem. The various points covered by the report, all were simply covering items that had been brought up either in earlier discussions with LaGuardia and his correspondence with LaGuardia in newspaper reports. Okay, I'll talk about Harlem Hospital as an example.

After the riot, after the mayor's commission, after the commission report was made public, there were some responses by government to the longstanding complaints of people in Harlem. One example, Harlem Hospital. Here is a hospital, it's called Harlem Hospital, it's in the middle of Harlem surrounded by black people. Black doctors had a terrible time getting into Harlem Hospital to practice. Harlem Hospital had segregated eating facilities. Nurses who were black had a separate dining room, hard to believe that this was going on in the 1930s in New York City, not Mississippi, not Alabama, New York City.

And before the riots, my father had worked with some of the doctors to try to open up Harlem Hospital. But it was after the riots that the government finally began to respond to open up the hospital to black doctors, to integrate all the facilities, and also to integrate all of the emergency room operations, all the medical operations, because sometimes you would have a black man or woman arrive at Harlem Hospital in the early 1930s and not get the level of treatment that a white person would get. This finally began to change after the riot. But there were still some institutional problems. My father was concerned that once the emergency goes away, once the rioting is off their

front pages, that the attention of the people downtown and the backing of the people downtown would start to go away, a familiar story. And that is when he used to say that he began to focus more and more on institutional change in elected politics in New York, that Harlem, to be a player downtown, couldn't rely on the good intentions of elected white officials. Harlem had to have its own elected and appointed black officials downtown at City Hall in the rooms where the budgets are being carved up and where all of the goodies are being distributed. You had to be at that table. And that effort led to the City Council seat, which he finally won at the end of the decade of the 1930s.

And that in turn led to the creation of a congressional district in Harlem. Harlem was always represented. People could always vote. It's just that the way the district lines were drawn, it was always pie slices, a little bit of Harlem would vote with this part of the white community there. This little bit of Harlem would vote with this part of the white community over here. So, it Harlem represented by Vito Marc Antonio, very progressive congressman, but as you can tell from his name, Italian, you had Harlem represented by members of city government, mostly white. And so, the big push after the rise, the big institutional push after the riot was to change the way Harlem elected officials to unify the strength of the black vote to create a force that would elect a black men and women to local and then in the 1940s to national office.

I have a little tiny glitch on that was led to the city council to see a little camera glitch. Do you need that line? Foley on camera? No. Okay. How much influence, if any, what's the legacy of the glory and FDR in terms of them opening up to government and being more inclusive, particularly in New York City, I mean, Italians used blacks if you were anything, but I wish you were shut out. Okay. On the federal level, blacks weren't really participating in the electoral process heavily before Roosevelt and the naval lynchings and what not going. How much did they open up to government to be more inclusive and give more people to shout at this dream called America? The politics in Harlem changed a great deal in the 1930s. At the beginning of the decade, you still had much of the black vote, most of the black

vote, historically going to their Republican party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves. And it was really Franklin Roosevelt, who on a national level and in Harlem began to bring that vote into the Democratic Party, where it has remained more or less ever since. In return, that gave my father and others the clout to go in and say, okay, we now want to be, if we're the ones who are contributing to your majority, if we're the ones who are delivering these votes for you on election day, we want to be there after election day to be working with you. And so it was a major change, certainly in New York politics, where the city government had been the preserve, really, of the Irish, to the exclusion of not just black New Yorkers, but Italian New Yorkers and Jewish New Yorkers and everybody else.

And so suddenly you had the beginnings of opening up a city hall, first to this mayor who was elected, who was himself, Italian and Jewish, and then by the end of the decade, opening reluctantly or otherwise to somewhat more influence by the black community. This was not a panacea, this is not a paradise that's suddenly been reached by 1939, but at least it was having some influence in the process, whereas before the influence had really been as distant outsiders. And now at least you had a few people inside when that door closed and the decisions being made inside that room. You had one or two people from Harlem, one or two people from parts of the Bronx that might not have been represented before, one or two people from parts of Brooklyn that

might not have been represented before. If you were to take a snapshot of that room in city hall where they all gather and close the door and make the decisions, if you had taken a snapshot in 1929, a snapshot in 1939, some very different kinds of people were in the room ten years later than had been the case at the end of the 20s. Tell me about your father's feelings regarding government responsibility and the expansion of government and services of people. Oh my. Nothing was happening. How did your father feel about what the government could and should do? He had some somewhat, I've got to be stated, yes. My father had some somewhat controversial views on the subject of government assistance and how it should be delivered, probably going back to his experience with the programs

of the early 1930s and the beginnings of the New Deal, he never completely trusted the established power structure, the phrase he used often, established power structures to deliver money or services to people who really need it. He always used to try to deliver money or services either around the power structure, to get money directly to people or in creating totally different structures. And sometimes this sounds like conventional politics, oh, Powell's building his own political machine, look at some of the clippings from the late 30s and early 40s, the things that he was trying to create for his own benefit. But if you go back and look at what he was writing and saying in the 30s, it really was the

very same concept, which is that government must be the last resort of people who have no other alternative, but that the link between the people who need it and the government that has it, that must be a direct link. Some more people are getting the way, they're going to be the people who get the money. That was his objection to the CWA, that was his objection to a variety of government programs in the 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s. And was a central tension between him and the established power structure, the mayors and the others who wanted that money to go through City Hall rather than directly to Harlem.

Well now that we're out, I can really tell you. Here's our daily dose of room town. In a sanderl.

and an Istanbul.