National Affairs: Adam’s Fall

“Let’s put it this way”, said California’s Democratic Representative Harry Sheppard last week. “The patronage committee is charged with taking care of Democrats. Period.” Sheppard was explaining the action, just completed, of the House Democratic Patronage Committee in firing a Negro employee of the House post office and a Negro member of the Capitol police force. Cause for dismissal: both had received their appointments through New York’s Democratic Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Negro who supported Republican Dwight Eisenhower for President because of his civil-rights record.

But if Powell was no longer considered a Democrat, what about Mississippi’s pure-white Democratic Representative John Bell Williams, who backed States’-Righter T. Coleman Andrews against Adlai Stevenson? Was that a case of another color? Well, said Sheppard, his group had not “as yet gone through the entire employment category and classified Democrats v. Republicans.”

To House Speaker Sam Rayburn from N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins came a letter urging against party punishment for Adam Clayton Powell. Reason: it might give the impression “that the Democratic Party is taking such action because of Mr. Powell’s race, and also because of his efforts to secure passage of civil-rights legislation.”