Harlem Parade (Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Passing in a Car)
1971 (depicting 1964)
Joseph Delaney (1904 -1991)
Oil on canvas, 40 1/2 X 50 3/4
Signed lower left: Joseph Delaney 1971
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Wallace Gilmore, 73.153.5

This vibrant crowd scene depicts the jubilant parade of 1964 to honor Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Harlem's most prominent politician from the 1940s to the 1960s. During the Great Depression, the younger Powell successfully established an assortment of much-needed social programs in Harlem -a soup kitchen, a job bank, a nursery school, and youth programs -and organized protests that helped to break down some of the racial barriers that existed in Harlem and elsewhere in the city. In 1938 Powell succeeded his father as pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the country's largest African American congregations. In 1941 he launched a highly successful, if subsequen-tly controversial, political career by becoming New York's first elected black City Council member and later the first African American representative to the U.S. Congress from a northeastern state.

A skillful, often charming parliamentarian, Powell rose to the chairmanship of the House Committee on Education and Labor during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963 -1968). Powell used that post to help pass legislation important to Johnson's Great Society anti-poverty programs and to assure that African Americans, both within his constituency and nationwide, benefited from these initiatives structured to provide schools, housing, and jobs for the country's poor. Often flamboyant and outspoken in ways that alienated other politicians, Powell was indicted for income tax evasion in the mid 1960s and eventually censured for that transgression by his congressional colleagues. Despite such problems, some of which mired him in lengthy legal battles, Powell managed to win reelection to eight terms in the House of Representatives, even though an outstanding warrant for his arrest precluded his entering New York City except on Sundays, when laws prevented such warrants from being executed. During those visits Powell preached to a packed congregation, striking chords of empathy with emotional sermons that stressed the importance of "black power," a phrase he coined in an address at Howard University in 1966.

The "hero's parade" shown here, occurring a month after the Democratic Party convention of 1964 had secured Lyndon Johnson's nomination for the presidency, included "a sixty-car caravan, [with] Powell riding in a shiny black Cadillac and pumping his fist in the air and toward the crowds lining the streets."¹ The varied, spirited people who are depicted enjoying the parade reflect the congress-man's broad base of support within the Harlem community, ranging from the sober-hatted men seen in rows behind Powell's car to scantily dressed dancers performing on a passing float to a smiling mother holding her child in the lower-left corner of the scene to beaming policemen managing the traffic flow. The message scrawled repeatedly across the patch of sky at upper left, "Baby I love you," underscores the community's boundless support.

The African American painter Joseph Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and learned to draw on his own before enrolling at New York City's Art Students League in 1930. His older brother, Beauford Delaney, a more celebrated artist, may have stimulated Joseph's curiosity about drawing. At the league Joseph studied with Thomas Hart Benton, from whom he absorbed an interest in Social Realism as it included figures within the American landscape; George Bridgeman, who taught him anatomy; and Alexander Brooke. Delaney made many portraits of famous people and other figures who interested him (Eleanor Roosevelt, Tallulah Bankhead, and Eartha Kitt were among his subjects). His Expressionistic scenes of urban events are noteworthy for the way his figures in crowds appear to respond in individualized ways -exuberantly, contemplatively, soberly, boisterously.

From 1932 until 1971 Delaney often worked as a sidewalk portraitist in Washington Square and Brooklyn's Prospect Park. During the Depression he found employment in the Easel Program of the Federal Art Project, taught art, and executed drawings for the Index of American Design. His work has been exhibited at two world's fairs, galleries, and museums, among them the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York.

Notes:

  1  Wil Haygood, King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 307.