A Minnesota PBS Initiative
Dossier: Mr. Colin Powell
“The Negro continues to live in a separate social world and the white press pays little attention to his everyday existence.” --E. Franklin Frazier.
Former Secretary of State, 4 Star General, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell retired from the military 9/30/93 with thirty five years service. Through the NSC (National Security Council) he advised Presidents Clinton, Reagan, (Gorbachev, 1988) and George H. Bush (“I thought the world of him and always will.” My American Journey. N.Y.: Random House, 1995.)
Born 4/5/37 to parents who emigrated from Jamaica to America in their twenties for a better life, at age 4 he stuck a hairpin into an electric outlet. The family moved to South Bronx when Colin was age 6. In Morris High School his family complained that he was without direction.
Haywood Patterson (1912-1952) explains, “The deep-down part of a man, you never know that. That’s the best living of a human being. That’s where he is real. That’s what he’s going to do. You don’t know what a man is going to do unless he tells you. People keep things to themselves. All of a sudden they do something, and that was the best part of them all the time.” [Source: Scottsboro Boy.]
Powell joined the U.S. Army June, 1958, after 4 years ROTC at City College of New York [CCNY]. He calls CCNY the college of the sons of poor men.
United States Army General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 6 November 1989. Public Domain.
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier,” Powell advises.
According to Powell, ‘If [the U.S. Army] had wanted you to have a wife we would have issued you one.’ Still, he married 8/25/62, and honeymooned in the A. G. Gaston Motel, Birmingham, AL; his wife Alma’s hometown.
He would say later of Alma’s family that they lived, “disciplined, austere lives…were voracious readers…From them, my kids absorbed a sense of discipline and a respect for learning. From the Powell side, the children absorbed a love of life. They met funny, irreverent characters, people who laughed, deep from the belly, without restraint, people who played as hard as they worked. Let’s have a party. Let’s have a song. Let’s dance.”
He arrived in Viet Nam 12/25/62, just four months after the wedding for his first tour of duty. His second tour in 1968 this Saigon totally different from his first. In 1973, he served in Camp Casey, South Korea, 25 miles from the DMZ. Fifty percent of the soldiers were Category 4 at that time he said; Category 5 are not suitable’ for service.
“I have grown painfully cautious and aware of my self as a Black American male,” James Allen McPherson wrote in Crabcakes. “This is the burden carried by all Black Americans, most especially the males.”
“When blacks go off in a corner for their kind of music or dancing,” Powell wrote, “I’m tempted to say to my white friends, ‘Don’t panic, we’re just having fun.’ Black soldiers in Korea vied for Aretha Franklin’s music on the jukebox in the clubs of nearby Tong Du Chon. Whites [soldiers] did not.
“I didn’t think, except occasionally,” wrote Cecil Brown, “in terms of whiteness and blackness, which is a measure of the power of thinking white. Isn’t it whiteness that we must fight in our lives?”
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“We had plenty of white problem soldiers.” Powell wrote, “But proportionately we had more disciplinary problem with blacks. Less opportunities, less education, less money, few jobs for blacks equaled more antisocial behavior in the States, and these attitudes traveled. I also observed that black soldiers were less skillful at manipulating the system than white troublemakers. The blacks tended to be defiant, as if breaking the rules were a badge of black pride.”
“Maybe more [Black] people could be very nice people in this world,” wrote actor Ruby Dee, “if their good fortune, their opportunity for advancement in life, were not cut off because of their race.”
“Poverty,” John McWhorter writes, “is a tragedy, not a lifestyle.” Powell fears taking whites ‘off the hook’ will cause backslide and McWhorter claims other blacks fear this as well. The late jazz trumpeter Miles Davis wrote, “Black people have got to keep saying it, keep throwing our conditions up into these people’s faces until something is done about the way they have treated us.”
“Among the blacks,” Mr. Powell says, “I had some of the finest soldiers and NCOs I have ever known.” Powell quotes the late West Point graduate and Tuskegee leader Ben Davis, ‘Combat was not easy, but you could only get killed once. Living with day to day degradation of racism was far more difficult.’ “Racism is easy to see, hard to prove, impossible to deny.” [Anon, African American Wisdom.]
“I’m an authority,” Althea Gibson (1927-2003) 1957 and 1958 tennis champ said, “on what it feels like to be the only Negro in all-white surroundings and I can assure you that it can be very lonely.” On competing at Wimbledon, she wrote, “building up more and more tension every day, you like to be with people of your own kind, people you can relax with and let your hair down with, and never have to be on guard with. Katherine [Landry] and Dot [Parks] did that for me, and it meant a lot.” Both were WAC (Women’s Army Corps) captains.
White officers would say, “’Powell, you’re the best black lieutenant I’ve ever known.’ Thank you, Suh, But inside me, I was thinking, if you intend to measure me against only black lieutenants you are making a mistake.” When Gibson and Arthur Ashe (1943-1993) were breaking the glass ceiling of tennis they asked to be measured on their skills, not their skin. Ashe called Affirmative Action an “insult.”
E. Franklin Frazier quoted a South Carolina convention of 1867: “The government of the country should not be permitted to pass from the hands of the white man into the hands of the Negro.”
Like the first presidential candidate of color Barak Obama, Powell is not of American slave ancestry. Like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who took apart time pieces to calm his nerves during intense Palestinian negotiations, Powell repairs old Volvos to calm his.
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier,” Powell advises. “General Powell,” wrote Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “is a man of maxims.” On hearing Powell’s name a passerby said, “Too bad he’s not running for president.”
Originally published in MSR (Minnesota Spokesman Recorder) 2008.
Biographical Details
Submitted From: Minneapolis, MN
Story Subject: Military Service
Military Branch: U.S. Army
Dates of Service: 1962 - 1963
Unit: South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) advisor
Powell returned to Vietnam in 1968, serving in the 23rd Infantry Division as a major then as assistant chief of staff of operations for the Americal Division.
Story Themes: African American, Colin Powell, Leadership, Race, Racism
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