ters" and was making a triumphal postwar tour of the United States when Europe was killed by one of his musicians. Number 6: Adam Clayton Powell Jr.Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 29, 1908. At the age of six months he moved with his parents to New York City, where his minister father developed the century-old Abyssinian Baptist Church into one of the largest congregations in the United States. After attending public schools and the City College of New York, Powell graduated with a B.A. degree from Colgate University in 1930, and received a M.A. degree in religious education from Columbia University in 1931. While the assistant minister and business manager of the Abyssinian Church in 1930, Powell used picket lines and mass meetings to demand reforms at Harlem Hospital, which had dismissed five black doctors from its staff because of their race. Beginning in 1932, he administered an extensive church-sponsored relief program providing food, clothing and temporary jobs for thousands of Harlem's homeless and unemployed. It was during these Depression years that Powell established himself as a charismatic and successful civil rights leader as he organized mass meetings, rent strikes and public campaigns that forced restaurants, retail stores, bus lines, utilities, telephone companies, Harlem Hospital and the 1939 World's Fair either to hire or to begin promoting black employees. These impressive victories secured for Powell an extraordinarily loyal support from Harlem residents who would stand behind him almost to the very end of his controversial career. Powell succeeded his father as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in 1936. In 1941 he was elected as an independent to the New York City Council. He was publisher and editor of The People's Voice, a weekly newspaper, from 1941 to 1945. In 1942 he became a member of the New York State Office of Price Administration, serving until 1944, and of the ...
