During my time as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I often met senior foreign military leaders during my travels. Sometime during our initial meetings, I came to expect this question to come up: “When did you graduate from West Point?” Apparently they were still of the view that a West Point commission was the only way to get to the top.
“I didn’t go to West Point,” I replied, “as much as that would have been an honor.”
“Well, did you attend the Citadel, the Virginia Military Institute, or Texas A&M?” they would then ask, referring to very well-known officer-producing institutions.
“No,” I answered. “When I was entering college, a black person couldn’t attend those colleges.”
An embarrassed cough usually followed, and then came the next question: “Oh, well, where did you go?”
The answer was the City College of New York, in Harlem, not far from where I was born. I was commissioned through CCNY’s ROTC program—the first ROTC graduate, the first black, and the youngest ever to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They immediately became curious. They had never heard of CCNY.
“It’s a great school,” I told them, “open to everyone.” I’d usually go on to explain that CCNY was founded in 1847 and was then called the Free Academy. It was the first fully open, free college in America—a daring innovation in those days, as its president, a West Pointer, Dr. Horace Webster, declared on opening day in 1849:
“The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated, and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.”
The experiment succeeded. CCNY became a college of the first rank, but since it was free and drew from the immigrant and lower-income populations, it became known as the “Harvard of the Poor.”
Time passes and I show up on campus in February 1954. I’m not sure how I got in. I was in no way an academic star. My high school grades were below the CCNY’s admission standards. Was I given a preference? I don’t know.
Earlier, when I was a teen looking at high schools, like most New York City kids I had dreamed of getting into the Bronx High School of Science, then the most prestigious high school in New York. (The story goes that Bronx Science has produced more Nobel Prize winners than France.) I didn’t have a prayer.
Forty years later, I came across a devastating note from my junior high school guidance counselor: “Young Powell wants to attend the Bronx High School of Science. We recommend against it.”
So, I went to Morris High School, where they had to let you in. I wasn’t a bad student there, nor was I a great one, but I graduated and went on to CCNY.
At CCNY I was initially an engineering major, but quickly dropped it. Later I settled on geology, but by then I had discovered ROTC. I fell in love with ROTC, and with the Army.
After four-and-a-half no-cost, undistinguished academic years, the CCNY administration took pity on me and allowed my ROTC A grades to remain in my overall average. This brought my average up to a smidgen above 2.0, high enough to qualify for graduation. To the great relief of the faculty, I was passed off to the U.S. Army.
Nearly sixty years later, I am considered one of CCNY’s greatest sons. I have received almost every award the school can hand out; an institute at CCNY has been named after me, the Colin L. Powell Center for Leadership and Service; and I have been titled a Founder and Distinguished Visiting Professor. Most of my professors have to be spinning in their graves over all that.
My city believed that kids like me deserved a shot at the top. The people of New York City were willing to be taxed to educate the “whole people”—poor kids like me with immigrant parents, Jews who couldn’t get into other schools because they were Jews, young adults with jobs who could only go to night school (it might take them seven years to finish), kids who lived at home and came in every morning by subway or bus. Education like the one I got at CCNY was how the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free were integrated into America’s social and economic life. Education was—and still is—the Golden Door.
Though I only walked away with a diploma by the skin of my teeth, I did come out of college with a wonderful liberal arts education. I found in the years to come that I was able to perform well alongside my West Point, Citadel, VMI, and A&M buddies . . . as well as my buddies from other colleges and universities all over the country. We were all a band of brothers.
When I left the State Department in January 2005, time opened up for me to visit CCNY and see what the Powell Center had been doing since its founding eight years earlier. I sat in the college president’s conference room and listened to each of about a dozen Powell Fellows tell me about themselves, what they were studying, and what they wanted to do with their lives. They were mostly minority, mostly immigrant, mostly first in their families to go to college, and mostly from low-income families. Many of them worked. But their eyes were bright, they were excited, they were hungry to do well. They had big ambitions, hopes, and dreams, and were working hard to succeed. Their words deeply moved me. They were just like I was more than fifty years earlier. CCNY was still the Harlem Harvard preparing another generation of public school winners. I told them how proud they made me and how I would be spending a lot of time at the Center.
In the years since that meeting, our programs have expanded enormously, with a focus on leadership training for these future leaders and on service learning so they could take their academic work into the community to help others. We changed the Center’s name—originally the Center for Policy Studies—to the Center for Leadership and Service. The Center rapidly outgrew its two-room corner office. I hope that soon a Powell Center building will rise on the campus. It will not only house the Center, but also become a centerpiece for the entire campus and a gathering place for the people of central Harlem.
I’m proud that the Center has been named after me, but I’m no less proud that some seven new elementary and middle schools have also been named after me. I have adopted a school in Washington, D.C., and partnered it with the parishioners of my church in suburban Virginia. These mean more to me than any medal I have received. And additionally, as part of my passion for youth development, I served on the boards of trustees of Howard University and the United Negro College Fund and on the board of governors of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.
I am frequently asked why youth programs and education have become a priority in my life. My answer is very simple: I want every kid to get the chance I had. No, West Point wasn’t in the cards for me, but it showed me the standard I needed to attain. Morris High School and CCNY gave me the means to reach those standards.
I’ve learned a simple and obvious truth from my own education experience: We have to give every kid in America the access to public education that I received. We need to place public education at the top of our priorities and the center of our national life.
Education has become my family’s great crusade. In 1997, at the request of President Clinton and our other living former presidents, I founded the America’s Promise Alliance to mobilize the country to give all our kids the basic skills and support they need to succeed in school and in life. Alma is now the chair of the Alliance, and our son Michael is on its board of directors.
America’s Promise focuses on five basic promises we must make and deliver to our children. We promise them a responsible, caring loving adult in their lives to guide them along the right path. Where the family is unable to do that, we need to provide mentors. We promise them safe places in which to learn and grow, protected from the negative influences encountered in too many of our communities. We promise to try to provide every child with a healthy start and access to continuing health care. We promise our kids a good education with marketable skills. Finally, we promise them an opportunity to serve others so that they grow with the virtue of service embedded in their hearts. We have created a powerful alliance of partnerships with schools, nonprofit youth organizations, governments, and businesses to make sure we once again become a nation of graduates, not dropouts. We need to do this for the sake of the kids, for the sake of the future of the country we all love, and for the sake of our noblest ideals.
I love telling the story of my rocky education career to youngsters. My point is, it isn’t where you start in life that counts, it is where you end up. So, believe in yourself, work hard, study hard, be your own role model, believe that anything is possible, and always do your best. Remember that your past is not necessarily your future.
Shortly after I retired from the Army in 1993, I was in West Palm Beach, Florida, giving a speech at the Kravis Center to a group of civic leaders raising money for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County. Before the event, I visited the Delray Beach Boys and Girls Club, also in West Palm Beach, a city where many of the less affluent and the workers who serve the affluent live. Maybe a hundred kids were sitting on the floor in front of me, ages ten to eighteen. I talked about growing up in Harlem and the Bronx and about my family and school experience. I tried to give them a Horatio Alger pitch. When I finished, I asked for questions. The little kids asked little-kid questions, like how much do you weigh, have you ever shot anyone, and what is your favorite color. The teens asked about my aspirations and my thoughts about running for president or vice president. Then a ten-year-old member raised his hand and asked, “I want to know if you think you would be where you are today if your parents didn’t care whether you were alive or dead.” He was talking about himself. My initial response was “I don’t know.” Then after a few seconds to gather my thoughts, I said, “You know, if your parents are not there for you, it doesn’t mean the answers aren’t there for you. The answers are here at the Boys and Girls Club and at your church and in your school. You come to this club every day. People are here waiting to help you, to teach you, to make sure you have fun. You can make it if you believe in yourself as much as they believe in you. I am not saying it will be easy, but the answers are there. You have to find them.” I don’t know if I convinced him, but I knew I had to do as much as I could to help him and others like him.
You can leave behind you a good reputation. But the only thing of momentous value we leave behind is the next generation, our kids—all our kids. We all need to work together to give them the gift of a good start in life.