The complex legacy
Colin Powell knew where he fit in American history. The former US secretary of state, who died on October 18, 2021, at 84 as a result of Covid-19 complications, was a pioneer: the first black national security adviser in US history, the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and also the first black man to become secretary of state.
But his "American journey" - as he described it in the title of a 2003 autobiography - is more than the story of one man. His death is a moment to think about the history of black men and women in the US military and the place of African-Americans in government.
But more profoundly, it also speaks to what it means to be an American, and the tensions that Colin Powell - as a patriot and a black man - faced throughout his life and career.
I'm a scholar of African-American studies who is currently writing a book on the great civil-rights intellectual W E B DuBois. When I heard of Powell's passing, I was immediately reminded of what DuBois referred to as the "doubleconsciousness" of the African-American experience.
As DuBois put it in an 1897 article and later in his classic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, this "peculiar sensation" is unique to black Americans: "One feels his two-ness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
This concept profoundly describes Colin Powell as a soldier, a career military man and a politician.
On the surface, Colin Powell's life would seem to refute DuBois's formulation. He stood as someone that many people could point to as an example of how it is possible to be both black and a full American, something DuBois viewed as an enduring tension. There is a narrative that Powell used the military to transcend race and become one of the most powerful men in the country. In that sense, he was the ultimate American success story.
But there is a danger to that narrative. Colin Powell's story was exceptional, but he was no avatar of a colorblind, post-racial America. The US Army has long been seen as a route for black Americans, especially young black men, out of poverty. Many chose to turn their service into a career. By the time Powell, the Bronx-raised son of Jamaican immigrants, joined the US Army, there was already a proud history of blacks in the US military - from the "Buffalo Soldiers" who served in the American West, the Caribbean and South Pacific after the American Civil War to the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.
Powell was part of that military history. He joined in 1958, a decade after desegregation of the Armed Forces in 1948. But the US military was - and still is - an institution characterized by structural racism. That was true when Powell joined the army, and it is true today.
As such, Powell would have had to wrestle with his blackness and what it meant in the military: What did it mean to serve a country that doesn't serve you?
As a military man during the Vietnam War, Powell also stood apart from many black political leaders who condemned US action in Southeast Asia.
While Muhammad Ali was asking why he should "put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people" at a time when "so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights," Powell was making his way up the military ranks.
It helps explain why despite Powell's undoubted achievements, his legacy as a black leader is complicated.
His identity - being of Jamaican heritage - posed questions about what it means to be an African-American. His life in the military prompted some to ask why he would serve a country that has historically been hostile to non-white people in the US and around the world. The veteran activist and singer Harry Belafonte likened Powell in 2002 to a "house slave" in one particularly contentious remark questioning his loyalty to the US system.