The Great Depression; Interview with Adam Clayton Powell III. Part 1

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

In 19—let me think of how I can tell this to a family audience

Dante James:

And the year has to be within, from '32-'36.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

Yeah, it's, it'd be the early '30s...in the early '30s, my father was supporting McKee for mayor. He was very much a well-connected New York politician, he was Cardinal Spellman's lawyer, he was very central to the Catholic Church in New York, he was newly-elected President Roosevelt's choice to be mayor, and my father was McKee's Harlem campaign chairman. LaGuardia won that election in a, on a Fusion platform. Fusion meant many things to many people. To some it meant LaGuardia himself, who was half-Italian and half-Jewish in business politics, which was then controlled by the Irish. To others it meant political fusion, because he was bringing together different parties, different opposition parties, but after he was elected, with a great deal of optimism among Liberal and Progressive forces in New York City, things did not always go smoothly between him and my father. In fact, things rarely went smoothly between him and my father, especially in the early years, and my father used to refer to him mockingly as a Liberal, he called him a Liberal, so in print it would look, \"The Liberal Mayor,\" but if you heard him in person it was the \"Liberal\" mayor. LaGuardia's nickname, little flower, which was a term of endearment, even affection in some communities, my father would always turn it in a sarcastic or sardonic way, he would say, \"the little flower has wilted,\" \"little flower is fading,\" so things that might appear in print as neutral or even favorable things that my father said, he actually said with a great deal of sarcasm. So, many people downtown in New York, reading the newspapers, would think \"Oh, that's a complimentary thing that Powell has said,\" or at the very least something neutral, whereas if you were there, on the corner of 125th Street, or in the Abyssinian Church, hearing him say it, you knew it wasn't entirely complimentary.

Dante James:

Now-

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

Of course, politics changes from day to day, and political alliances change from day to day, seven years later LaGuardia endorsed my father for city council.

Dante James:

Migration.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

OK... many of the members of our church came from the South, some came from the islands, and in that huge wave of migration in the early part of the 20th century, right up through the 30s, and 40s, you had a lot of people coming to New York for a better way of life, same thing that motivates people moving anywhere, almost anywhere. I remember so many people in the church telling stories of how hard it had been when they were growing up in the South, and how they had heard that the North was the Mecca, and there was even a joke that my father used to tell, that even though the Whites may own New York, and the Whites may run New York, but the Blacks enjoy New York. That was what people heard throughout the South, you've got to get to New York. Of course, you get to New York and times are pretty tough, especially in the Depression, people in Harlem had a hard time getting work even in Harlem, where less than one percent of the work-force of many businesses in Harlem was black. You had people running up against discrimination in Harlem that they hadn't really expected to find, they'd known, their parents would certainly have known first-hand the days of slavery, and they come to the North, they come to this paradise, and find little money, discrimination in Harlem, in New York City. This came very much as a surprise to many of them, probably to most of them, they could look up and see the buses going up and down the streets of Harlem, all white bus-drivers—no blacks were allowed—in New York. At the same time, the IND subway had just been finished, a New York City-owned, brand-new subway system with subway lines running through Harlem. Only whites could be employed there. Blacks could be employed as toilet attendants, but nothing else. This was in New York. The telephone company opened up a new exchange for the then-brand-new dial system on 146th Street, in Harlem, and the vice-president of the telephone company testified, in public, that he would not hire black workers to work at that exchange. He also said off the record he wouldn't hire Catholics or Jews. This is in Harlem, in New York City, and in the 1930s. Even on 125th Street you had the thoroughfare, the main east-west street in Harlem, where most people did their shopping, you had department stores, you had the Woolworth's Five-and-Dime, you had dress shops, you had all kinds of stores, and blacks could not work behind the counter in those stores. That, of course, became the centerpiece for the \"Don't Buy Where You Can't Work\" campaign, and it was remarkable that these things were going on in Harlem. And probably now, when we look back on it, it sounds like something that may have been going on in Mississippi or Alabama. It may have been going on in the 19th century, but these were things going on in New York City in the middle third of this century.

Dante James:

Tell me more about the \"Don't Buy Where You Can't Work\" campaign and how, I guess, for lack of a better description, \"pissed off\" your father and other Harlem residents were, and how they came together, and what they did about, what they did, and your father's role in particular.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

Well, there's an antecedent to the 125th Street campaign, which was actually started by my grandfather, Adam Clayton Powell Senior, the pastor of the Abyssinian Church before my father took over. He had an informal, and what my father probably would've called a much too polite protest. He would go to store-owners and bring them receipts brought by members of the Abyssinian Church, saying, \"look how many thousands of dollars our church members are spending at your store: you really should employ black workers.\" Didn't get anywhere, just ran up against a brick wall. When my father got involved in the campaign, he was a, always, an advocate of more direct action. He would play off one store against another. I can remember, he and I would walk down 125th Street, this of course was years later, but he would still have the memories as if they had just happened the day before. He would say, \"Oh yes, Thursday we began picketing over there, then we set up a line over there at the Woolworth's, and Woolworth's was the key one, when Woolworth's went, that was the end, everybody went, it all happened so quickly. Oh yes, I remember that five-and-dime store over there, we had to picket there, they wouldn't even talk to us, wouldn't meet with us.\" There was a restaurant, called Frank's, which was near the end of 125th Street, and my father said \"We always stopped here, we never closed down Frank's, because after our campaign finished and we had blacks employed at all these stores, and all these establishments up and down 125th Street, I said there should be one place in Harlem where black people could go to eat, and be waited on by whites.\"

Dante James:

Now—

Dante James:

Now, you just told me that they brought the stores in line, but how did the government respond, and how did they feel about it, I mean, particularly LaGuardia, and your father's relationship with him, was there any prodding from your father to get him to get involved and to try to get these businesses to do the right thing?

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

Yes. Well, let me rephrase it as a complete sentence. When my father used to talk about that campaign, and he did quite often, it was obviously a central memory for him and a central event in his career, he used to discuss how the \"downtown forces,\" as he would call it—City Hall, government—didn't seem to be that interested in this campaign, and it was part of an overall pattern that he saw. Even someone who was viewed as a progressive, such as Fiorello LaGuardia, when he was mayor, was willing to compromise on points that my father thought were simply beyond compromise. Whether it involved employment, whether it involved housing—they had a bitter clash over housing, public housing in New York, housing that was made possible by the city of New York, even if it were built effectively with subsidy from the city by private companies. Because in the 1930s, in New York City, you had major housing projects going up which were segregated, not de facto segregation, but overt, explicit, no-blacks-allowed-in-this-housing-project.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

No one knew what was really going to happen, it was just amazing, they said \"Well, we think it'll happen, but who knows,\" and so watching these guys grab something with their hands [laughs] sounds like...

Dante James:

OK, so, housing, you were...?

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

In New York City in the 1930s, even with a progressive mayor, you still had the construction and operation of new housing, public housing or quasi-public housing, housing subsidized through the city, built by private companies, which was segregated. It was not de facto segregation because of housing patterns, it was explicit, mandated segregation. The managers of the housing project said that \"We will not permit blacks to move in.\" This was a central dispute between my father and LaGuardia. LaGuardia saw a supply of new housing being built which would be available at a reasonable cost to the people of the city of New York. My father looked at the same project and saw public dollars indirectly subsidizing a housing project from which Harlemites would be barred. There was no compromise on this between the two of them, LaGuardia said \"Yes, I want this to be built,\" my father said \"No way, unless blacks are permitted,\" and eventually there was a compromise, which was the Harlem river-houses, which grew out of other pressures and the Harlem Riots, which provided housing for black people in Harlem. But that clash over the Stuyvesant Town Housing Project, which was an explicitly all-white housing project, was central and also typical of the kinds of disputes that they had, between a mayor who viewed himself as progressive and getting services for most of the people, and this minister from Harlem, as yet unelected to anything, but a community leader seeing city services being denied to black people in Harlem.

Dante James:

Tell me about their relationship in regard to the public works programs, in particular the CWA, PWA and the racism and discrimination that was in those programs. I read somewhere in one of the articles we talked about, where your father referred to LaGuardia and his administration as Fusion-

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

-for Fascism, right [laughs].

Dante James:

If you could you just talk to me about that a little bit?

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

Well there was, let me just look down for a second, there was another quote, I just want to get it right—

Dante James:

Hang on, just let me get settled...OK, it's all yours.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

There was a very high level of unemployment, very difficult times, very little money, few jobs, a difficult time in Harlem. Everyone says that when the rest of the country has a recession, Harlem had a depression. Well, now the rest of the country was in a depression, so things in Harlem were even worse. I remember my father saying that members of the Abyssinian Church, of the children who were in those families, sixty-three percent were under-nourished. Sixty-three percent. That was such an omnipresent force for change that, even before the New Deal and before the city welfare department, my father, and his father before him, had organized private relief efforts. My grandfather, the minister, pastor, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., out of his own pocket donated one thousand dollars to start the first soup kitchen, and my father ran it, with volunteers. This was before there was a city welfare department, before the New Deal agencies came in. Around the same time, my father formed a committee of wealthy whites from downtown, who would make donations, and every week, he would describe to me how every week this truck would come and deliver two our three thousand dollars in cash to Abyssinian Church to pay people. These were not giveaway programs. Everyone who received any money from this program had a job assigned to him or her, they were cleaning up the community, they were providing services to the community. My father said that he was determined not to have it as a giveaway program, he said \"If it takes a man or woman standing in one spot and cleaning that one spot until it shines, they're going to be working to get their money.\" You can imagine what happened. Even with two or three thousand dollars a week, that was only enough to pay, even in Depression-level salaries, that was only enough to pay a hundred and fifty, or at most, two hundred people each week, and word spread like wildfire through Harlem that there was money, cash, for those willing to work. Very quickly, there were lines of thousands of people at the Abyssinian Church, wanting to work to get money, clearly beyond the scope or capacity of these privately funded projects. So, when the government became involved, through the Roosevelt administration, and brought in all of the CWA, and all the NRA and the other programs, there was a great deal of hope that now there would be millions of dollars coming into Harlem for relief, to put people to work, to alleviate hunger, that this finally is the answer. And so,

the disillusionment when that money didn't seem to find its way into the pockets of the people who needed it in Harlem, was severe.

I remember my father talking about the New Deal, those early days in 1933 and '4 [1934], and saying it was just an alphabet soup, a Greek alphabet, people didn't know how to translate CWA into jobs, into money. People didn't know how to get it. So the money was going somewhere, but it wasn't going into the pockets of those that needed it in Harlem. And especially coming after the very modestly funded private efforts, which were just two or three thousand dollars in the case of the program run at Abyssinian, where people saw all the money being loaded off the trucks and being handed to people who needed it, to have millions of dollars coming into New York from the federal government, and then not seeing it, people were very disillusioned. They said, \"What's happening here, where is the money going, why can't the people who want to work and want to feed their children, why can't they get this money?\" It was... we can only imagine now how much of a disillusionment that must have been.

Dante James:

In regard to those programs, particularly those PWA programs, they received an enormous sum of money, I think it was 44,000,000 dollars, to complete the Triborough Bridge, which goes right into Harlem, I think at 125th Street. I have an article from the New Amsterdam Times newspaper that says that \"after the struggle to get the money,\" it says, \"funds for Triborough allocated to bring jobs to Harlem,\" and then all of a sudden, when it comes time to hire they find that they're not hiring black people. Do you have any-

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

Well, I remember the headline, the headline was \"Prosperity for Harlem Workers.\" Thousands of people saw the headline, \"Prosperity for Harlem Workers,\"

here's this huge project, they're going to build this huge bridge to connect Harlem to Long Island and the Bronx. Huge project, people all thought this would be a great boom to Harlem, a supply of jobs, money flowing into the community. Then, to turn around and discover that the people running the Triborough Bridge Project had no intention of hiring black workers,

or if they had intentions of doing so, they mysteriously didn't, and you can look at the photographs of the bridge under construction today, and you'll see all white faces,

this a bridge which on the Manhattan end of it, ended at 125th Street right in the heart of Harlem.

Dante James:

Do you remember your father ever speaking about, not necessarily that particular situation, but that situation along with other racism and discrimination that had him and other members of Harlem disillusioned with Roosevelt and the New Deal, and LaGuardia? I mean, they came in with the idea of being more inclusive, and yet, the kinds of things that happened with the Triborough happened.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL III:

What I think was not anticipated—no, let me restate it—even in my lifetime, I can remember my father referring to difficulties that he was having within the liberal progressive coalition, and he could trace some of those problems back to the days before he even held elective office, when he was a young minister in Harlem, in the Depression. You had these huge progressive coalitions supporting Roosevelt for President and then, in New York City, LaGuardia for mayor. But once Roosevelt and LaGuardia were elected, they had a very different role. They were now governing relying on different elements of these coalitions that didn't always see things the same way.