Minister Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was born a free person of color in Franklin County, Virginia, on May 5, 1865, to Mildred “Sally” Dunning. His father is unknown, although many have speculated about his identity.

On Powell’s seventh birthday, in 1872, his stepfather, Anthony Bush, subscribed to a Washington-based paper that mentioned “men could earn a dollar a day and women twelve dollars a month in West Virginia.” In early fall 1875, the family sold most of what they owned and took a two-day train ride to Coalburg in Kanawha County. The family got jobs working on the Tompkins Farm—presumably a reference to the “Cedar Grove” house and farm operated by William Tompkins and Rachel Grant Tompkins, an aunt of Ulysses S. Grant, the sitting president of the United States.

Of this time, Powell later wrote, “My stepfather took charge of the Tompkins’ stable and farm for one dollar a day, my mother took charge of the Tompkins’ kitchen for twelve dollars a month and I took charge of the Tompkins’ cows for fifty dollars a year. This was a great promotion for all of us. All I had received up to that time was ten cents a day for picking up apples for a brandy still.”

During his first year in West Virginia, Powell notes that his “education was interrupted” due to a lack of schools for Black people in that area. After working for a year on the Tompkins Farm, his family moved across the Kanawha River to the mouth of Paint Creek at Pratt. The first federal locks and dams on the Kanawha River were being built nearby, and Bush got a construction job on Dam 5. The 1880 census lists the young Powell’s occupation as a “hauler of water.”

Powell wrote about the lack of educational opportunities after relocating to Paint Creek, “I resumed my studies again under the direction of Mrs. Addie Bowles. I learned all she knew in less than two years, for her education did not go beyond compound fractions. All her pupils who finished fractions were told by her that they did not know them well and she made them repeat. I got tired of this deception and left school.”

In his autobiography, written some 60 years after this period, Powell gave a distinctly negative overview of his time in West Virginia. The high point was meeting his future wife, Mattie Fletcher Shaffer, on their way to school in 1878, when he was 13 and she was 6. Her early life involves some ambiguities. According to public records, Mattie was born in Fayette County on February 4, 1872, to Eliza and Samuel Buster, who appears to be Eliza’s brother. Six weeks before, his mother had married William Shaffer in Fayette County. As a result, it is not clear whether Mattie’s biological father was Samuel Buster or William Shaffer.

Powell stated that Mattie was one of the few, if only, positives of his time in West Virginia:

 “Aside from my meeting with Mattie Fletcher Shaffer, my eight years’ sojourn in West Virginia was a mental and moral disaster. If there were five men over twenty years of age living at the time in Kanawha Valley between Malden and [Hawks Nest] with high moral ideals or literary aspirations I never met them. The chief aim of the average man was to possess a pistol, a pair of brass knuckles and a jug of hard liquor. Fights were numerous and life was cheap. I soon became a part of all I met.

“Not a man advised me to read a good book or to aspire to anything noble during these years. The itinerant preachers who stopped at our house exhorted me to seek the Lord, but I did not take them seriously because they could drink more liquor and eat more stolen chickens with less communion of conscience than I. Perhaps the chief reason for my antagonistic feeling towards these ministers was that they ate all the chicken except the neck, head and feet. I still possess a very good set of teeth which I attribute to the chewing of chicken bones in my early teens.”

He recalled reading books about outlaws and troubled youth such as Jesse James, Peck’s Bad Boy, The Arkansas Traveler, Sut Lovingood, and The Blunders of a Bashful Man. He noted that “these books plus my companions made me a cheap edition of a desperado.”

Powell moved from Paint Creek to Rendville, Ohio, in August 1884, at age 19. In his autobiography, he did not detail the circumstances that prompted his move but noted it was “to keep from being lynched or murdered.” Several books, including his son’s autobiography, have interpreted this claim to mean that Powell had been in a serious fight with, or perhaps even killed, a White man in Kanawha County. However, there is no documented evidence of this. While his son’s assertion could be correct, Powell Sr. also may have been referring more generally to his raucous lifestyle or the discrimination he experienced.

Interestingly, his first four years in West Virginia overlapped with the beginning of Booker T. Washington’s teaching career in Malden, about 15 miles to the west.

In Ohio, Powell became a Christian and reformed his lifestyle. He did return at least briefly to West Virginia to marry Schaffer in Kanawha County on June 30, 1889. They moved to Washington, D.C., where he graduated from Wayland Seminary (now part of Virginia Union University) in 1892. He served briefly as a minister in Philadelphia and then in New Haven, Connecticut. During his time in New Haven, the couple’s two children were born: Blanche Powell (King) (1898-1926) and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (1908-1972), who would become the most powerful Black congressman, and one of the most controversial, of his era.

From 1908 to 1936, Powell Sr. was pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, overseeing the construction of its current home and building the congregation to some 10,000 members. By the 1920s, Powell Sr. was one of the most influential Black leaders in the country, helping to found the National Urban League and many other organizations.

Mattie Powell died in Manhattan on April 22, 1945, at age 73. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. died in New York on June 12, 1953.