you can't be real with that comment? do you have a clue about how apartheid america was not too long ago and secretly and openly still is in many facets of life? the u.s. senate still is. the black church was once a united force against racism and segregation in this country. they helped push through voting rights laws, fair housing laws, school desegregation laws, desegregate restaurants and hotels and other public venues etc, etc.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. - Great Black Heroes
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. - Greatest Black Politician of His Time | Great Black Heroes
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. loomed as a giant in the Black community of Harlem, not only as the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, but also as a community activist and as the first African-American to represent New York in the United States House of Representatives.
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut on November 29, 1908. He was the son of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., then a Baptist minister in New Haven and his wife Mattie Buster Shaffer. He had an older sister Blanche and the family was of mixed racial origins, African, European and Native American. Powell Sr. had graduated from Wayland Seminary, Yale University and Virginia Seminary and was chosen to pastor the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York, eventually growing the church to more than 10,000 members.
Committee chairmanship and legislation
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In 1961, after 15 years in Congress, Powell advanced to chairman of the powerful House
Education and Labor Committee. In this position, he presided over federal social programs for
minimum wage and
Medicaid (established later under Johnson); he expanded the minimum wage to include retail workers; and worked for equal pay for women; he supported education and training for the deaf, nursing education, and vocational training; he led legislation for standards for wages and work hours; as well as for aid for elementary and secondary education, and school libraries.
[21] Powell's committee proved extremely effective in enacting major parts of
President Kennedy's "
New Frontier" and
President Johnson's "
Great Society" social programs and the
War on Poverty. It successfully reported to Congress "49 pieces of bedrock legislation", as President Johnson put it in an May 18, 1966 letter congratulating Powell on the fifth anniversary of his chairmanship.
[27]
Powell was instrumental in passing legislation that made
lynching a federal crime, as well as bills that desegregated public schools. He challenged the Southern practice of charging Blacks a
poll tax to vote. Poll taxes for federal elections were prohibited by the 24th Amendment, passed in 1964.
[28] Voter registration and electoral practices were not changed substantially in most of the South until after passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided federal oversight of voter registration and elections, and enforcement of the constitutional right to vote. In some areas where discrimination was severe, such as Mississippi, it took years for African Americans to register and vote in numbers related to their proportion in the population, but they have since maintained a high rate of registration and voting.
[2]
