Hands Off Adam!

The white liberal was riding on a bus when he spied a bug crawling up the collar of a Negro passenger. Solicitously he reached over and plucked the bug away. Instantly the Negro turned on him indignantly. "Put it back, man," he snapped. "You white folks don't want us to have anything."

This story, making the rounds of Harlem, illustrates the Negro's attitude toward the growing controversy over Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell (TIME, Dec. 30). Powell may be an absentee Congressman, a fugitive from a jail sentence and any number of other reprehensible things--but he is regarded as a Negro who has made it in a white man's world. That makes all the difference. Powell's personal problems, which seem to mount day by day, last week threatened to become an unfortunate facet of the civil rights movement.

Greatest Love. One after another, Negro leaders began standing up to defend Powell, who faces a jail term for evading a defamation judgment. He is also being investigated by a House subcommittee looking into irregularities in the spending of the Education and Labor Committee, of which he is chairman. Powell's defenders served notice that they would battle any move to challenge his seating in Congress or otherwise censure him.

In Washington, a group of 100 Negro clergymen declared that efforts to punish Powell had stirred a "sense of outrage" among the nation's 22 million Negroes, demanded "a thorough investigation of the practices of all committee chairmen and their members."

One member of the group, the Rev.

Jefferson P. Rogers, charged flatly: "The only reason Adam Clayton Powell draws this special kind of attention is that he is a Negro and wields power like a white man wields power."

In Manhattan, some 200 civil rights leaders turned out for a defend-Powell meeting in the Harlem headquarters of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. "We view with alarm and disbelief," said Randolph, "the attempt by a small and vindictive clique in the House to unseat the Representative from Harlem." Randolph assured the session that he had talked by phone with Powell, who was still vacationing in his Bahamian island retreat, and that Adam had sent "his greatest love" to all in attendance. Cried Livingston Wingate, onetime Powell aide and former director of HARYOUACT, a New York City antipoverty agency: "They're not after Adam. They're after his black power."

March on Washington? Nonetheless, Powell's defense was not helped by the failure of his estranged Puerto Rican wife Yvette, who is on Powell's payroll as a $20,578-a-year assistant, to show up for a scheduled appearance before the investigating subcommittee. The panel wanted to ask Mrs. Powell, who lives in San Juan, whether she has been violating the law requiring congressional assistants to work either in Washington or in their Congressman's home district. As a result of her failure to appear, Subcommittee Chairman Wayne Hays of Ohio said that he would recommend that she be removed from the congressional payroll, and that steps be initiated to cite her for contempt of Congress.

For his part, California Democratic Congressman Lionel Van Deerlin, who has threatened to challenge Powell's seating, announced that instead of asking for an outright barring, he would request the appointment of a committee to investigate Powell's conduct. Under this plan, Powell could take his seat and draw his salary but would not be entitled to vote during the investigation. Harlem's leaders threatened to dispatch "busloads" of demonstrators to the capital in a spectacle reminiscent of the 1963 march on Washington. The purpose: to pressure Congress to keep its hands off Adam.

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