By Tamara Shiloh

Gen. Colin Powell (1937–2021), born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrant parents Luther and Maud Powell, rose to the highest reaches of the U.S. military: four-star general. He would go on to become the country’s first Black Secretary of State. His successes weren’t without support and the foundation set early on.

Propelling Powell to exceed his own expectations were those of his parents: “We were not allowed to fail,” he said during a 2006 New York Daily News interview. Powell said those words “didn’t mean you had to be a general or a doctor or a lawyer. In fact, that was the furthest thing from my mind when I was a kid in New York City. But you had to stay in school, and you had to do well, and you had to meet (their) expectations: ‘We didn’t come to this country for the next generation to blow it.’”

Powell’s childhood was storied. Raised in a four-bedroom, third-floor apartment on Kelly Street in the South Bronx, Powell came from modest means. His father worked in Manhattan’s Garment District, and his mother was a seamstress. He often said that he loved his tenement neighborhood.

Surrounded by a large extended family as well as people of varied cultures, Powell described his childhood experiences in New York City as being exposed to “every type of person you could imagine,” and that it “meant so much to me as I grew up and learned the importance of diversity.”

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Powell attended New York City’s public schools before enrolling at City College of New York and later earning an MBA from George Washington University. It was at City College that he found his calling: The Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He began to build relationships that later led him to the U.S. Army—a move that would eventually direct his future.

Via jobs as military assistant to high-level government officials and a stint as national security adviser to then-President Ronald Reagan, Powell rose quickly through the ranks. He became the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was instrumental in the 1991 Persian Gulf War victory but struggled over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003—at which time he was serving as secretary of state under then-President George W. Bush, Powell’s most difficult assignment.

As the Pentagon’s top officer, Powell, who viewed himself as a problem-solver, called for “applying military might only with overwhelming and decisive troop strength, a clear objective, and popular support,” the Washington Post reported. Journalists later dubbed this method “the Powell Doctrine.”

Interestingly, throughout his career, Powell avoided racial activism. He believed “race factored much less in his professional success than his ability to work within institutions, where he competed with whites on their own terms,” according to the Washington Post. “My race is somebody’s else’s problem … It’s not my problem,” he had said.

After retiring from public service, spending time on the lecture circuit, and becoming founding chair of America’s Promise, Powell died Oct. 18, 2021. He was 84.

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