Manhattan Civilian Defense, serving until 1945. In 1944 he was elected to Congress, representing New York's newly created Twenty-second (later Eighteenth) District. Powell became a member of the Seventy-ninth Congress on January 3, 1945. During his first term he served on the Indian Affairs, Invalid Pensions and Labor committees. In 1947 he took a seat on the Education and Labor Committee and sat on the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs from 1955 to 1961. Soon after his arrival in Washington, Powell challenged the informal regulations forbidding black representatives from using Capitol facilities reserved for members only. Following the lead of Oscar De Priest, Powell took black constituents to dine with him in the "whites only" House restaurant and ordered his staff to eat there whether they were hungry or not. On the House floor, Powell clashed almost immediately with one of the chamber's most notorious segregationists, John E. Rankin of Mississippi, and introduced legislation to outlaw lynching and the poll tax and to ban discrimination in the armed forces, housing, employment and transportation. he attached an anti-discrimination clause to so many pieces of legislation that the rider became known as the Powell Amendment. Powell attended the landmark Bandung Conference of Africa and Asian nations in 1955. Upon his return he urged President Eisenhower and other American policy makers to take a firm stand against colonialism and pay greater attention to the emerging Third World. The following year he broke party ranks and supported Eisenhower for reelection, charging that the Democratic platform's civil rights plank was too weak. In 1958 he survived a trial for income tax evasion, which ended in a hung jury, and a determined but unsuccessful effort by New York's Tammany Hall machine to oust him in the Democratic primary. In 1961 Powell became chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor and began the most productive and s...
