My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  The discipline, the structure, the camaraderie, the sense of belonging were what I craved. I became a leader almost immediately. I found a selflessness within our ranks that reminded me of the caring atmosphere within my family. Race, color, background, income meant nothing. The PRs would go the limit for each other and for the group. If this was what soldiering was all about, then maybe I wanted to be a soldier.

  I still worked occasional weekends and the Christmas season at Sickser’s. But as the school year ended, I wanted a summer job that paid more. And that is how I became a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 812. I had started out the summer in a Harlem furniture plant, screwing hinges on cabinets. My father was delighted to see me get up every morning and head for a paying job. But within three weeks, I told him that I had decided to leave. Pop was not happy. “You work three weeks and just up and quit? What are you gonna tell the boss?” I explained to Pop that I could make more money shaping up every morning with the Teamsters. I could read the message in Pop’s eyes. Shape up? When is this kid going to shape up? I made up some excuse for quitting and, to avoid embarrassment, sent a friend to pick up my last paycheck at the furniture plant.

  I did earn more shaping up every day at the Teamsters Hall, usually working as a helper on soft drink delivery trucks. One day the Teamsters agent announced a steady summer job that did not require shaping up, porter at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant in Long Island City. None of the white kids raised a hand. The job was mine, though I was not quite sure what a porter did in a bottling plant. When I reported in, I was handed a mop, an experience that black workers have had for generations. I noticed that all the other porters were black and all the workers on the bottling machines were white. I took the mop. If that was what I had to do to earn $65 a week, I’d do it. I’d mop the place until it glowed in the dark. Whatever skill the job required, I soon mastered. You mop from side to side, not back and forth, unless you want to break your back. It could be godawful work, as it was the day fifty cases of Pepsi-Cola bottles came crashing down from a forklift and flooded the floor with sticky soda pop.

  At the end of the summer, the foreman said, “Kid, you mop pretty good.”

  “You gave me plenty of opportunity to learn,” I told him.

  “Come back next summer,” he said. “I’ll have a job for you.” Not behind a mop, I said. I wanted to work on the bottling machine. And the next year, that is where he put me. By the end of summer, I was deputy shift leader, and had learned a valuable lesson. All work is honorable. Always do your best, because someone is watching.

  I returned to college in the fall of 1955, commuting from Kelly Street. I did not have to be an urbanologist to see that the old neighborhood was deteriorating. The decline was just the latest chapter in the oldest story in New York, people moving up and out as their fortunes improved, and poorer people moving in to take their places. The Jewish families who had escaped Lower East Side tenements for the South Bronx were now moving to the suburbs. Poor Puerto Ricans were moving into their old apartments. Hunts Point had never been verandas and wisteria. And now it was getting worse, from gang fights to gang wars, from jackknives to switchblades, from zip guns to real guns, from marijuana to heroin. One day, I came home from CCNY to find that a kid I knew had been found in a hallway, dead of a heroin overdose. He would not be the last. I had managed to steer clear of the drug scene. I never smoked marijuana, never got high, in fact never experimented with any drugs. And for a simple reason; my folks would have killed me.

  As better-off families continued to flee, properties began to decay, even to be abandoned. Landlords cut their losses short and walked away from their buildings. In years to come, my own 952 Kelly Street would be abandoned, then burned out and finally demolished. But that was all in the future. For now, conversation among my relatives typically began, “When you getting out?” Aunt Laurice moved to the northern edge of the Bronx. So did Godmother Brash. Aunt Dot was already in Queens. When were Luther and Arie going to leave?

  The secret dream of these tenement dwellers had always been to own their own home. And so the Powell family began heading for the upper Bronx or Queens, Sunday after Sunday, house hunting in desirable black neighborhoods. But the prices were outrageous—$15,000, $20,000, with my parents’ combined income totaling about $100 a week. Weekends often ended with the real estate agent sick to death of us and my sister embarrassed to tears.

  My father also dreamed about numbers. He bought numbers books at the newsstands to work out winning combinations. And he still went in every day with Aunt Beryl. They usually played quarters. Then, one Saturday night, my father dreamed a number, and the next morning at St. Margaret’s the same number appeared on the hymn board. This, surely, was God taking Luther Powell by the hand and leading him to the Promised Land. Somehow, Pop and Aunt Beryl managed to scrape up $25 to put on the number. And they hit it, straight.

  I still remember the atmosphere of joy, disbelief, and anxiety when the numbers runner delivered the brown paper bags to our house. Pop took them to his room and dumped the money on his bed, $10,000 in tens and twenties, more than three years’ pay. He let me help him count it. The money was not going into any bank. This strike was nobody’s business. The bills were stashed all over the house, with my mother terrified that the tax man or thieves would be coming through the door any minute.

  And that was how the Powells managed to buy 183-68 Elmira Avenue, in the community of Hollis in the borough of Queens—for $17,500. The house was a three-bedroom bungalow in a neighborhood in transition; the whites were moving out and the blacks moving in. My folks bought from a Jewish family named Wiener, one of the few white families left. The neighborhood looked beautiful to us, and the Hollis address carried a certain cachet, a cut above Jamaica, Queens, and just below St. Albans, then another gold coast for middle-class blacks. Our new home was ivy-covered, well kept, and comfortable, and had a family room and a bar in the finished basement. Pop was now a property holder, eager to mow his postage-stamp lawn and prune his fruit trees. Luther Powell had joined the gentry.

  But owning a home frightened Mom. She worried constantly about making the mortgage payments. She talked incessantly about her old friends left at Banana Kelly. After a few months, my father came to me almost in tears. “I don’t think we can stay,” he said. “Your mother can’t take the loneliness. I’m not sure she’ll make it through the winter.” Two years passed before Mom overcame her fears, realized they could carry the mortgage, and stopped running back to the South Bronx.

  I now began commuting from Queens to CCNY via the subway, which led to my first serious romance, with a CCNY student. We began riding the A train from the campus downtown, where we would transfer, I out to Queens and the girl out to Brooklyn. I took her to meet my parents. They were perfectly polite to her, but reserved.

  My main college interest remained ROTC and the Pershing Rifles. Geology continued to be secondary, though I did enjoy the field trips. We went upstate and clambered over formations of synclines and anticlines. We had to diagram them and figure out their mirror images. If you had an anticline here, you should be able to predict a complementing syncline bulging out somewhere else. Very satisfying when I got it right. Geology allowed me to display my brilliance to my noncollege friends. “You know, the Hudson really isn’t a river.” “What are you talking about? College kid. Schmuck. Everybody knows the Hudson River’s a river.” I would then explain that the Hudson was a “drowned” river, up to about Poughkeepsie. The Ice Age had depressed the riverbed to a depth that allowed the Atlantic Ocean to flood inland. Consequently, the lower Hudson was really a saltwater estuary. I proudly pinpointed the farthest advance of the Ice Age. It stopped at Hillside Avenue running through Queens. You can see the ground sloping down along that line into St. Albans and Jamaica. I was startled to earn an A in one of my geology courses and wound up with three A’s in my major by graduation.

  In my junior year, I enrolled in advanced ROTC, which paid a prince
ly $27.90 a month. My idol was still Ronnie Brooks. In his first two years at CCNY, Ronnie had become a cadet sergeant. I became a cadet sergeant. In advanced ROTC, Ronnie became a battalion commander. I became a battalion commander. Ronnie was a drillmaster. I became a drillmaster. Ronnie had been the PRs’ pledge officer, and in my junior year I became pledge officer, which allowed me to do something about the way we went after pledges. I told the brothers there was something wrong if the only way we could attract members was with dirty movies. Besides, I said, all the fraternities are doing the same thing. So what’s our edge? Let’s use a little imagination. Let’s show movies of what we do, like drill competitions. Let’s show them what we’re all about.

  The Pershing Rifles had a basement room in one of the houses along Amsterdam Avenue, provided by the CCNY administration to give this largely commuter campus a touch of college social life. I told the brothers to go out on the street, corral kids after they had gotten their jollies from porn movies at other houses, and bring them over to our place to see movies about what the PRs did. I was taking a risk. Success as a pledge officer was easy to measure. Pledges were either up or down from previous years. I anxiously awaited the day the rushees made their choice. When it was over, the Pershing Rifles had attracted the largest pledge class in years. This was a defining moment for me, the first small indication that I might be able to influence the outcome of events.

  One of the student pledges during this period was a rough diamond whose destiny was set the day he joined ROTC and the Pershing Rifles. His name was Antonio “Tony” Mavroudis, a Greek-American, also from Queens, who worked part-time as an auto mechanic. Tony was coarse, profane, street-smart, full of life. I loved him. Just as I had found my model in Ronnie Brooks, Tony found his model in me. We became as close as brothers, commuted together, dated together, raised hell together. And our lives were to be indelibly marked together, Tony’s more fatefully than mine, by a place neither of us had probably heard of at the time, Vietnam.

  During my last three college years, the drill hall became the center of my universe. A Major Nelson was in charge under the more remote Colonel Brookhart. The major ran interference for us with the college administration as we courted probation for mediocre grades, cutting classes, and pledge-week pranks. ROTC was also my introduction to the backbone of the Army, the NCOs who drilled us and taught the nuts-and-bolts courses. I remember most vividly a rough master sergeant named Lou Mohica: “Gentlemens, this is the Browning Automatic Rifle. I am going to teach youse how to disassemble and assemble the BAR. Listen to me, cuz if youse don’t youse could die in combat. Any questions so far?”

  I spent almost every Saturday at the drill hall, up to seven hours at a stretch, drawing an M-1 rifle with the rest of the PR drill team, practicing the Queen Mary salute, rifle spins, and diagonal marching with fixed bayonets, a perilous business if you were careless. The Pershing Rifles took part in two competitions, regular drill, which Ronnie led, and trick drill, the fancy stuff, which he entrusted to me. In the spring of 1957, my junior year, we participated in a competition at the 71st Regiment Armory in New York against ROTC units from Fordham, New York University, Hofstra, and other institutions in the metropolitan region. We arrived with our mascots, Coke and Blackjack, two squirrels.

  Ronnie took his team out on the floor and scored 460 out of a possible 500 points to win the regular drill competition. Then it was my turn to lead the eighteen-man trick drill team. We had polished our brass with blitz cloths until we’d almost worn out the metal. Our faces were reflected in our shined shoes. And I had a few surprises in store that we had secretly rehearsed. Ordinarily, the drill team captain would just mark time as the team moved into its next maneuver. Instead, I launched into a dance solo, a step popular at the time, the camel walk. The audience went wild. We scored 492 out of a possible 500 points and took first place. My ambition for the next year was to succeed Ronnie as cadet colonel of the entire CCNY regiment, become company commander of the Pershing Rifles, as Ronnie had been, and sweep both ends of the drill competition.

  Needless to say, none of the Pershing Rifles’ successes cut much ice with the general CCNY student body, which at best tolerated us as chauvinist nuts. At worst, the campus newspaper called for dissolving ROTC.

  I have a desk set that I have carried with me for over thirty-five years, two Scheaffer pens and pen holders mounted on a marble base. I kept the set on my desk in the White House when I was National Security Advisor and at the Pentagon when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I cherish it for what it says on a small attached plaque, a story that begins on a day in the summer of 1957.

  It was an anxious moment for my father. Pop had taken me to lunch with two ROTC pals, Tony DePace and George Urcioli, and then to the Greyhound bus terminal in Manhattan. He was fidgeting, full of dire warnings, convinced he was never going to see his son again. My friends and I were off to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, for ROTC summer training, my first venture into the South. Pop told me that he had asked our priest, Father Weeden, to find some black Episcopalians in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg, to look after me. I was embarrassed and told him to stop fussing.

  As it turned out, we were picked up by the Army at the bus depot immediately and whisked off to Fort Bragg, where I spent the next six weeks isolated from Southern life. If Fort Bragg was an ethnic awakening for me, it was in meeting whites who were not Poles, Jews, or Greeks. Here I met virtually my first WASPs. We spent our days training on the rifle range, firing 81mm mortars, learning how to camouflage and how to set up roadblocks, and I loved every minute of it. I also got off to a running start. My reputation for drilling troops had preceded me, and I was named acting company commander.

  At the end of our six weeks, we fell out on the parade ground for presentation of honors. We were judged on course grades, rifle range scores, physical fitness, and demonstrated leadership. I was named “Best Cadet, Company D.” These are the words engraved on the desk set that was presented to me that day and that I still treasure. A student from Cornell, Adin B. Capron, was selected Best Cadet for the entire encampment. I came in second in that category.

  I was feeling marvelous about my honor. And then, the night before we left, as we were turning in our gear, a white supply sergeant took me aside. “You want to know why you didn’t get best cadet in camp?” he said. I had not given it a thought. “You think these Southern ROTC instructors are going to go back to their colleges and say the best kid here was a Negro?” I was stunned more than angered by what he said. I came from a melting-pot community. I did not want to believe that my worth could be diminished by the color of my skin. Wasn’t it possible that Cadet Capron was simply better than Cadet Powell?

  I got a more elemental taste of racism while driving home. I left Fort Bragg with two white noncommissioned officers from the CCNY ROTC unit. We drove straight through the night, occasionally stopping at gas stations that had three rest rooms, men, women, and colored, the one I had to use. Blacks were apparently ahead of their time, already unisex. I did not start to relax until we reached Washington, didn’t feel safe until we were north of Baltimore. I was reminded of that old routine from the Apollo’ Theater: “Hey, brother, where you from?” “Alabama.” “I’d like to welcome you to the United States and hope you had a pleasant crossing.”

  These brief episodes apart, the summer of ’57 was a triumph for me. I was returning home to my girl. I was bringing my parents something they had never had from me—proof, with my desk set, that I had at last excelled. And I had found something that I did well. I could lead. The discovery was no small gift for a young man at age twenty.

  Back in college, I continued doing just enough to get by, my other mediocre grades pulled up by straight A’s in ROTC. The previous spring, Colonel Brookhart had informed me that I was going to succeed Ronnie Brooks. I was to be cadet colonel, running the entire CCNY regiment, then one thousand strong. I was also elected company commander of the Pershing Rifles. I was intent on winning both the r
egular and trick drill competitions for the PRs at that year’s regional meet, as Ronnie had done before me. I led the regular drill team and delegated the trick drill team to an imposing fellow named John Pardo, a fine leader.

  I sensed early on, however, that the drill team was losing its edge. John was distracted by girlfriend problems. Other members came to me complaining that his mind was not on the upcoming competition. I wanted to take the team away from John and give it to somebody else. The best solution was probably to take it over myself, since I had led the winning team the year before. But John kept saying, “I can do it.” We competed that year, as I recall, at the 369th Regiment Armory. We won the regular competition, which I led, but lost the trick competition. Overall, we came in second. I was angry, mostly at myself. I had failed the trick drill team, and I had failed John Pardo too, by letting him go on that floor unprepared, when I knew better.

  That day, I started absorbing a lesson as valid for a cadet in a musty college drill hall as for a four-star general in the Pentagon. I learned that being in charge means making decisions, no matter how unpleasant. If it’s broke, fix it. When you do, you win the gratitude of the people who have been suffering under the bad situation. I learned in a college drill competition that you cannot let the mission suffer, or make the majority pay to spare the feelings of an individual. Long years afterward, I kept a saying under the glass on my desk at the Pentagon that made the point succinctly if inelegantly: “Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”