New York: Adam’s Vacuum

Once he was Harlem’s favorite leader, preacher and rogue. They winked at his womanizing and junketeering, packed the Abyssinian Baptist Church every Sunday to hear his baritone homilies. But seven months after the U.S. House of Representatives refused to seat him because of abuses of office, Adam Clayton Powell is beginning to become just a flamboyant memory to the 431,000 people he no longer represents.

Powell has not been home for nearly a year, fearing that he will be clapped into jail on contempt charges springing from his failure to pay a libel judgment to a Harlem widow. Although the faithful overwhelmingly endorsed him yet again in a special election last April to fill the House seat vacated by his exclusion, Powell remained ensconced on Bimini with his former secretary Corinne Huff. Two weeks ago, he did interrupt his endless summer long enough to spirit himself into Washington for an hour’s testimony before a federal grand jury looking into his possible misdeeds.

Meantime, and until the courts decide whether Powell’s exclusion from the House is constitutional, Harlem remains a district without a Congressman. For months, Republican Theodore Kup-ferman, representing Manhattan’s Silk Stocking district, has been fielding problems from Powell’s old constituents. But now the petitions from Harlem have been reduced to a trickle (only one all summer), and Kupferman observes, “What they’re doing is proving that they don’t need a Congressman.”

To solve their troubles with the Government—most concern welfare and Social Security payments—Harlem’s residents are appealing to state and city agencies. Only rarely do they write to the luxurious four-room suite that Powell used to occupy in the new Rayburn House Office Building n Washington. Two secretaries, a tiny remnant of the staff that Powell once commanded as a Congressman and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, remain in the office to answer mail.

In Harlem, a bus driver remarked last week, “It’s fine with me if Adam stays out of Washington, because then we’re not going to pay our taxes. No taxation without representation.” But one Harlem Democrat saw Adam’s vacuum differently: “He’s been away from the people too long. He should come back and fight like a man. There are plenty of other good men around.”