The Scholar in the Room: Augustus "Gus" Adair, the Baltimore Goon Squad, and the Architecture of Black Power

When thirteen Black members of the House of Representatives organized the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971, they were a small group, but not a group of newcomers. Several, among them Charles Diggs, John Conyers, Augustus Hawkins and Robert N.C. Nix, had served in Congress for years alongside Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who lost his seat in 1970 before the caucus formed. Many others came to Washington with experience in state legislatures and local office. By 1971 their numbers had reached a critical core. What the caucus still needed was a national agenda and a staff to help carry it through Congress. Augustus "Gus" Adair, a Morgan State political scientist who became its executive director in 1973, helped them shape that agenda and navigate the House. He brought with him lessons learned in the pews of Union Baptist Church and around the table of a group Baltimore called the "Goon Squad."

Carver's Paperboy

Adair was born in Chicago on August 5, 1932, the older of identical twins, and was raised with his brother Andrew at Tuskegee Institute by his grandparents, Rev. Russell and Annie Ford. As a boy he delivered newspapers to George Washington Carver, and both twins appeared on Carver's Sunday radio program. They later led bands as drum majors at Tuskegee and at Morehouse and joined Alpha Phi Alpha.

A Morehouse Man in West Baltimore

After finishing Tuskegee Institute Laboratory and High School, Adair earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Morehouse College in 1954, during the presidency of Benjamin E. Mays, who taught his students that education carried a duty to serve. After teaching at Mississippi Valley Vocational College and Grambling College and serving two years in the U.S. Army, he spent 1961 to 1963 in Washington as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow in the office of Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., working in both houses of Congress. In September 1963 he joined Morgan as an assistant professor and assistant director of its Institute for Political Education. He became the institute's director in 1966 and an associate professor in 1967. He had earned a master's degree in political science at Atlanta University in 1955 and did graduate work at the University of Michigan and Boston University before completing a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University in 1977. At Morgan State University he chaired the political science department and was twice elected president of the Faculty Senate. After his death in 1989, colleagues C. Vernon Gray and Michael Kamara wrote a memorial in PS: Political Science & Politics that praised his mentorship and his commitment to social change.

Adair did not treat scholarship as a retreat from the street. In Baltimore he studied power and then helped people take it.

Eleven Men and a Borrowed Insult

The Goon Squad got its name from a white reporter who used the word to dismiss a circle of Black ministers, professors, and lawyers who kept showing up where they were not wanted. The men thought the insult was funny and kept it. According to Wendell F. Phillips, son of member Rev. Wendell H. Phillips, the core eleven were Rev. Frank L. Williams, Rev. Wendell H. Phillips, Rev. Vernon N. Dobson, Rev. Harold Dobson, Rev. Marion C. Bascom, Parren J. Mitchell, Prof. Augustus "Gus" Adair, Judge Joseph C. Howard Sr., Prof. O. Patrick Scott, attorney Lalit H. Gadhia, and Dr. Homer Favor.

They had no bylaws, officers, minutes, or bank account. They decided by consensus and moved together, Phillips wrote, "like a flock of birds." Their working motto was "Sticks in a bundle cannot be broken," and they spoke only in the language of "we" and "us." Their faith rested on Matthew 25:40: what you do for the least of these, you do for God.

Many of their meetings centered on Union Baptist Church on Druid Hill Avenue, where Rev. Vernon Dobson, born on October 29, 1923, became senior pastor in 1967 and served for forty years. Dobson was Adair's pastor. The pulpit supplied the people and the moral voice; Adair, Favor, and Scott at Morgan supplied the research.

From Gwynn Oak to the Agnew Walkout

The ministers among them helped lead the July 1963 protests that desegregated Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore County, where Dobson was among those arrested. Five years later, after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Baltimore burned. Six people died, hundreds were injured, and thousands were arrested as National Guard and federal troops occupied the city.

On April 11, 1968, Governor Spiro Agnew summoned about one hundred Black leaders to a state office building and scolded them for failing to stop the rioters. Dobson and Bascom led a walkout. The moment marked a public break between Black Baltimore and a governor who would soon become Richard Nixon's vice president.

The Goon Squad's answer to 1968 was organization. Adair advised Parren Mitchell's campaigns in 1968 and 1970 and managed them from 1972 onward. He also advised Joseph C. Howard, State's Attorney Milton B. Allen and court clerk Paul Chester in their races. In 1970 Mitchell beat a nine-term incumbent, Samuel Friedel, in the Democratic primary by just 466 votes and became Maryland's first Black member of Congress. It backed Judge Joseph C. Howard Sr., whose research exposed racial disparities in how Baltimore courts handled rape cases. That pairing of data and protest became Adair's method.

Building the Caucus

Mitchell arrived in Washington in January 1971 and joined the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus under its first chairman, Rep. Charles C. Diggs Jr. of Michigan. Howard Robinson served as the caucus's first staff director. On February 1, 1973, Adair became the caucus's first executive director, on leave from Morgan, serving until 1975 and giving the members a professional staff that could research, draft, and follow through.

The caucus quickly showed what that meant. Nixon had refused for more than a year to meet with the members. When the caucus boycotted his 1971 State of the Union address, the White House finally agreed. On March 25, 1971, the members presented Nixon with sixty recommendations covering jobs, housing, health care, education, civil rights enforcement, and the military draft. It was a governing agenda, not a petition.

From Spokesman to Power Bloc

Under Chairman Charles B. Rangel, the caucus changed course. In May 1973 The New York Times reported that it was dropping its role as a national spokesman for Black America to concentrate on legislation. Adair ran that shift. The caucus stopped handling individual complaints from across the country, built a coalition of about forty national organizations, launched a Legislative Alert to track bills, and in August 1974 briefed the new president, Gerald Ford.

A memo in the Barbara Jordan Archives shows the work up close. On June 21, 1974, writing from Rooms 306–307 of the House Annex, Adair sent members a draft letter to President Nixon about the needs of 750,000 Black Vietnam veterans. The caucus's 1974 dinner program called him a scholar with "an excellent knowledge of practical politics" who had advised candidates in Maryland and across the country since 1966.

Adair's ties to Rep. Augustus F. "Gus" Hawkins of California ran nearly as deep as his ties to Mitchell. They began in 1963, when Hawkins arrived as only the fifth Black member of the House and took a seat on the Education and Labor Committee, the panel Adam Clayton Powell Jr. chaired while Adair served as a congressional fellow in Powell's office. A decade later, as caucus director, Adair coordinated the members behind Hawkins's subcommittee on the Office of Economic Opportunity; a May 16, 1973, memo from Adair circulated the draft caucus statement for that fight. The caucus's 1974 dinner report credited its "close work with the sub-committee on OEO programs headed by member, Gus Hawkins," and the coalition Adair's staff built, with "salvaging several OEO programs" the Nixon administration had tried to dismantle. Hawkins went on to chair the full Education and Labor Committee and co-write the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978.

The 1986 Race and the Student Who Won

When Mitchell retired in 1986, Adair ran for his seat in a crowded Democratic primary that included Clarence M. Mitchell III, A. Dwight Pettit, Wendell Phillips and a former student, Kweisi Mfume, who had studied political science with him at Morgan. Adair's campaign literature leaned on his Capitol Hill record: the Powell fellowship, the caucus directorship, his work alongside Gus Hawkins and his years running Mitchell's campaigns. Mfume won. He went on to chair the caucus Adair had helped build, from 1993 to 1995, led the NAACP as president and CEO from 1996 to 2004, served as chief executive of the National Medical Association from 2010 to 2011, and returned to the same House seat in 2020.

Adair returned to teaching and mentoring, and he was completing a year as a visiting professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, when he died of cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital on May 12, 1989. He was 56. The Washington Post remembered him as a civil rights advocate and "political mover and shaker" who held key advisory roles in the campaigns of Baltimore officials and judges, and who managed Parren J. Mitchell's congressional races. He was survived by his brothers, Andrew A. Adair, his twin, and James L. Adair.

Five days later Mfume rose on the House floor with a tribute titled "Farewell to a Political Mentor." He recalled Adair's arrival on Capitol Hill in 1961, when only four Black Americans served in Congress, and his place in Baltimore's Goon Squad. Of their 1986 race he said: "You could always count on Gus Adair to be well prepared to eloquently answer any questions asked during the candidates forums we attended together. In fact, Gus was the first one to congratulate me upon my election night victory."

Why It Matters

Today the Congressional Black Caucus has more than sixty members, a foundation, and decades of leadership behind it. William H. Gray III became the first Black majority whip in 1989. Jim Clyburn later held the same post. Hakeem Jeffries now leads House Democrats. Each of them inherited an institution that someone had to build from nothing.

Gus Adair is rarely named in that story. He should be. He carried a Baltimore lesson to Washington: protest opens the door, but research, organization, and patience keep it open. Sticks in a bundle cannot be broken.

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