Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Agitator, U.S. Congressman, and Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, Powell was nicknamed "Mr. Civil Rights" during his tenure in the House of Representatives. Powell consistently positioned himself on the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement and rarely missed an opportunity to embarrass his white colleagues by exposing racism and hypocrisy in the most public way possible.
In the 1950's, as foreign relations increasingly became a legitimate means to both ameliorate domestic racism and bolster support for US policies abroad, the Asian African Conference at Bandung seemed the perfect place, to Powell, to address both US race relations and ideology on the same stage. Over State Department objections, Powell attended the conference as a journalist and observer so that a "person of goodwill" from the United States would be present. Powell's staunch defense of the US and his uncharacteristically amiable version of US race relations garnered him as much criticism as it did praise.
(Image is an un-used portrait made for the cover of Time Magazine by Bernard Safran.)