Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

In the 1860 census, she is listed as a free Mulatto, as were her mother, grandmother, and siblings.

She appeared to have named her son after her older brother Adam Dunning, listed on the 1860 census as a farmer and the head of their household.

Sally never identified the father of Adam Clayton Powell Sr., born in 1865.

In 1867, Sally Dunning married Anthony Bush, a Mulatto freedman.

All the family members were listed under the surname Dunning in the 1870 census.

The family changed its surname to Powell when they moved to Kanawha County, West Virginia, as part of their new life there.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (November 29, 1908 – April 4, 1972) was an American Baptist pastor and politician who represented the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the United States House of Representatives from 1945 until 1971.

He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York, as well as the first from any state in the Northeast.

Re-elected for nearly three decades, Powell became a powerful national politician of the Democratic Party, and served as a national spokesman on civil rights and social issues.

He also urged United States presidents to support emerging nations in Africa and Asia as they gained independence after colonialism.

Powell was born in 1908 in New Haven, Connecticut, the second child and only son of Adam Clayton Powell Sr. and Mattie Buster Shaffer, born poor in Virginia and West Virginia, respectively.

His sister, Blanche, was 10 years older.

His parents were of mixed race with African and European ancestry (and, according to his father, American Indian on his mother's side).

By 1908, Powell Sr. had become a prominent Baptist minister, serving as a pastor in Philadelphia, and as lead pastor at a Baptist church in New Haven.

Powell Sr. had worked his way out of poverty and through Wayland Seminary, a historically black college, and postgraduate study at Yale University and Virginia Theological Seminary.

In the year of his son's birth in New Haven, Powell Sr. was called as the pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.

He led the church for decades through major expansion, including fundraising for and the construction of an addition to accommodate the increased membership of the congregation during the years of the Great Migration, as many African Americans moved north from the South.

That congregation grew to a community of 10,000 people.

Due to his father's achievements, Powell grew up in a wealthy household in New York City.

Because of some of his European ancestry, Adam was born with hazel eyes, light skin and blond hair, such that he could pass for white.

However, he did not play with that racial ambiguity until college.

He attended Townsend Harris High School, then studied at City College of New York before starting at Colgate University as a freshman.

The four other African American students at Colgate at the time were all athletes.

For a time, Powell briefly passed as white, using his appearance to escape racial strictures at college.

The other black students were dismayed to discover what he had done.

Encouraged by his father to become a minister, Powell became more serious about his studies at Colgate, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1930.

After returning to New York, Powell began his graduate work and in 1931 earned an M.A. in religious education from Columbia University.

He became a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first African-American, intercollegiate Greek-lettered fraternity.

Later, apparently trying to bolster his black identity, Powell would say that his paternal grandparents were born into slavery.

However, his paternal grandmother, Sally Dunning, was at least the third generation of free people of color in her family.

In 1961, after 16 years in the House, Powell became chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, the most powerful position held by an African American in Congress to that date.

As chairman, he supported the passage of important social and civil rights legislation under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Following allegations of corruption, in 1967 Powell was excluded from his seat by Democratic Representatives-elect of the 90th United States Congress, but he was re-elected and regained the seat in the 1969 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in Powell v. McCormack.

He lost his seat in 1970 to Charles Rangel and retired from electoral politics.

According to Charles V. Hamilton, a 1991 biographer of Powell, Anthony Bush "decided to take the name Powell as a new identity", and this is how they were recorded in the 1880 census.

Adam Jr.'s mother, Mattie Buster Shaffer, was African-American with possibly some German ancestry.

Her parents had been slaves in Virginia and were freed after the Civil War.

Powell's parents married in West Virginia, where they met.

(In his autobiography Adam by Adam, Powell says that his mother had partial German ancestry.) They and their ancestors were classified as Mulatto in 19th-century censuses.

Powell's paternal grandmother's ancestors had been free persons of color for generations before the Civil War.