Adam Clayton Powell Jr., warts and all

[AP photo] Adam Clayton Powell Jr., left, and Martin Luther King Jr. sometimes clashed, but in 1965 they both appeared at a news conference at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City.

By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published February 16, 2002

On the surface, they couldn't be more different.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a firebrand politician and clergyman, renowned for his ego, his taste in women and fine clothes, his knack for attention-getting demonstrations and his suave style -- along with his commitment to civil rights and amazing record of achievement in the late '50s as head of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and Labor.

[Times photo: Dirk Shadd] Adam Clayton Powell III insisted that the TV biopic about his historymaking father be true to the man’s strengths and weaknesses.

Few people under 40 may know his name now, but Powell was the most powerful black politician in the country during the 1950s, helping create landmark programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start -- and even contributing to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Sitting in the restaurant at the Hilton in St. Petersburg a few weeks ago, Adam Clayton Powell III cut a different figure. Down to earth and charming in a bookish way, the younger Powell passed up the chance to succeed his dad in political and religious circles to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and become a journalist.

His resume has a weight of its own, including jobs as vice president of news programming for National Public Radio, manager of network radio and TV news for CBS News, news director of WINS-AM in New York City and director of technology studies at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.

But unlike his flashy father, the son seems self-deprecating, low-key and quietly passionate.

In town recently to lecture at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which owns the St. Petersburg Times, the younger Powell smiled easily while recalling what could have been the most difficult challenge of his career:

Producing a TV movie about his legendary dad.

"The project actually started 27 years ago," chuckled Powell, 55, who saw the biopic move from NBC to ABC to Showtime in a development process that stretched over three decades. "To show you how long ago it was, they were (initially) aiming to get it on the air the week after Roots. So it's been around."

All the development, negotiations and planning come to fruition Sunday, when Showtime airs Keep the Faith, Baby -- a two-hour movie about Powell Jr.'s rise and fall that outlines a significant portion of black history in the life of one oversized man.

The movie tells its story mostly in flashbacks, as an older Powell Jr. reveals his life story to a black journalist who travels to the Bimini Islands to interview him. Beginning with his work getting black people jobs in positions previously limited to whites in New York City, the film shows how Powell Jr. parlayed his popularity as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to election as New York's first black city council member.

Eventually he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he pushed for equality for black elected officials and for his black constituents. (One humorous scene in the movie shows Powell moving five times to sit beside a racist Southern representative who refused to sit next to him, literally chasing the man from seat to seat.)

Using pressure tactics he perfected in New York, Powell Jr. is shown cutting a deal with John F. Kennedy to assure unprecedented (for a black politician) power as chair of the House Education and Labor Committee -- which then controlled 40 percent of the domestic budget -- in exchange for Powell Jr's amassing black voters to support Kennedy's bid for president in 1960.

Powell's confrontational style earned him many enemies, while his taste for fine living and fine women provided them with lots of ammunition. By 1966, he was accused of disgracing his office and denied his seat by the House. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated him in 1969, he lost a re-election bid in 1970.

"Progress is a bloody guerrilla war," says actor Harry Lennix as Powell Jr., leading a reluctant staffer to challenge the Jim Crow rules barring black members of Congress from the House of Representatives' dining area. "You have to keep pushing, plotting, scratching, fighting. Never let them rest. Keep 'em squirming. Be a burr in their saddle. Otherwise, they control and define your progress; you crawl after scraps."

So why have the history books forgotten Adam Clayton Powell Jr.?

"He just missed television," Powell III said of his father, who was indicted for tax evasion in 1958 and was sued for libel by a woman in 1960, just as TV was emerging as a cultural force in America. "If TV had been around in the late '40s and '50s the way it was in the late '60s, there would be a lot more known about him."

Perhaps. But the events shown in Keep the Faith, Baby suggest a broader explanation.

Always the power broker and aggressive politician, Powell Jr. had trouble sharing the stage with anyone. In a pivotal scene, he's shown instructing his staff to spread a completely bogus rumor that Martin Luther King Jr. and his openly gay chief aide are having an affair to undercut King's popularity and stop a protest march.

So when King stages his historic March on Washington, guess who isn't invited?

Truth is, Powell faced a series of embarrassing scandals -- placing his wife on his office payroll, taking pleasure trips at taxpayer expense -- just as TV cameras were capturing the noble sacrifices of civil right protesters throughout the South.

Is it any wonder that history chose to turn away from Powell just as his civil rights work was bearing fruit?

To his credit, the younger Powell insisted Keep the Faith, Baby include such material -- from the King mudslinging to his father's initial attempts to woo his mother, equally legendary pianist Hazel Scott, while still married to his first wife.

"(The honesty) was a central part of both his popularity in Harlem and his eventual unraveling on the House floor," said Powell III. "He made a point of not being any better than other members, just being more open about it. It would be as false to show an all-positive portrait -- as many were doing 30 years ago -- as to do an all-negative one."

Even for those who may never have heard of Powell Jr., Keep the Faith, Baby has the feel of a spot-on historical drama -- largely through the efforts of Lennix, who builds a compelling portrait of a man who died when the actor was still a child.

"Harry campaigned for three years to get the role," said Powell III of Lennix, best known for playing a physician who tries to romance HIV-positive physician's aide Jeannie Boulet on NBC's ER.

"He got his hands on every piece of video he could, to try to get gestures, mannerisms," Powell III added. "The first day of shooting, I walked on the set, and there's Harry dressed in my father's clothes . . . doing something with his left hand I hadn't seen in 30 years. He had seen a wide shot in a newsreel that showed (it)."

Still, Showtime executives felt the movie needed a celebrity actor to draw viewers. Enter R&B star and former Miss America Vanessa Williams as Scott -- a famous pianist who mixed R&B and classical styles and was one of the first black women to have her own show on television in the 1950s.

Some might think growing up the son of such luminaries would be tough. But Powell III recalls a conventional childhood spiced with unusual perks: playing a piano duet with his mother on national television (he later snuck onto the empty sets of Captain Video and The Honeymooners); learning to type by copying press releases for his father; playing checkers with a 25-year-old Quincy Jones in Paris; hearing legendary jazz saxophonist Lester Young warn him against taking drugs while shooting up himself.

"They created this surrounding for my sake . . . trying to be as "normal' as possible," Powell III said of his parents, who split up in 1957 when he was 12. "Every Saturday at 9 a.m., no matter where they were the Friday before, was our time together. In retrospect, it was amazing."

If Powell III ever had any problems coming to terms with his family's history, legacy and fame, he's conquered them by now, easily sharing stories on what he's called "my other job" of providing information and perspective to filmmakers as they assembled the movie.

Upon Powell Jr.'s death in 1972, his journals (including material that he may have used in a tell-all book about the indiscretions of his colleagues in Congress) and other items were stolen in a burglary.

So Keep the Faith, Baby stands as one of the last projects to immortalize his father's achievements and failures, crafted in part by two sons (brother and New York state Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV is also a co-producer) who never gave up.

"(The movie) has become more important over the last 27 years, because to a large measure, he really did fade from history," Powell III said of his father. "No one in the family is making any money on this. It's all for history."

At a glance

Keep the Faith, Baby airs at 8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. Grade: A.

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