in life: "Without it, you are on your way to nowhere" (Hughes 11). Powell has continued delivering this and related messages since he retired to private life--private in that he is no longer part of the government, but public in that he remains in the public eye and uses this fact to promote worthy causes to benefit the poor and to advance education among young people.
As noted, colin Powell was the son of jamaican immigrants and was raised in the Bronx. He was a graduate of the City College of New York and not West Point, as would have been the normal route for one who would rise so high in the military establishment. Powell served two combat tours in Vietnam and advanced in rank. In 1987, he accepted Ronald Reagan's appointment of him as national security adviser, at which time newspaper columnist Carl Rowan wrote,
To understand the significance of Powell's elevation to this extremely difficult and demanding post, you must realize that only a generation ago it was an unwritten rule that in the foreign affairs field, blacks could serve only as ambassador to Liberia and minister to the Canary Islands (Lanning 283).
Luther Powell was Colin's father and likely came from a long lineage of small farmers in Jamaica. once in New York, Luther became a shipping clerk for a firm in the garment district of Manhattan, where he worked for 23 years until the firm went out of business. He then moved to another textile firm doing the same sort of work. His wife, Maud, worked in different garment district forms as a seamstress. Much of her work was piecework at that time under which she did the work, cut off the tag on the garment, and used the tag as a receipt for the work done. Powell would state in an interview,
My early memories are of watching her on Thursday night sitting at the kitchen table, bundling up all these little tags, and putting rubber bands around them. that's how she got paid. She'd take them in the nex...