Bayard Rustin, who came to Harlem to attend City College in the early 1940s, recalls Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell from that period. At City College, Rustin was an organizer for the Young Communist League and then began to work for A. Philip Randolph. Bayard Rustin's negative feelings about Powell, revealed in this segment of the oral history conducted in 1985, were undoubtedly strengthened by later events. In 1960, Adam Clayton Powell threatened to tell Congress about Rustin's homosexuality, causing Martin Luther King, who had worked closely with Bayard Rustin during the Montgomery Boycott and thereafter, to publicly break with Rustin.

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