Colin Powell didn’t want warring factions over race

Gen. Colin Powell was the living embodiment of the American Dream.

At a moment when some argue that America is an irredeemably racist country, his extraordinary life offers a very different message for young Americans.

Powell was a patriot, deeply in love with this country. In 1994, he spoke to the graduates at Howard University — one of America’s great historically Black colleges — at a time of racial turmoil on campus. He took the opportunity to remind them they were blessed to have been born in the United States. “You have been given citizenship in a country like none other on Earth, with opportunities available to you like nowhere else on Earth, beyond anything that was available to me when I sat in a place similar to you 36 years ago.”

Indeed, the only privilege Powell was born with was being an American. He was raised in the South Bronx by immigrant parents who came from Jamaica seeking a better life. They worked in New York’s garment district — his mother as a seamstress and his father as a shipping clerk. Their son didn’t go to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point or The Citadel. He was a “C” student who attended the City College of New York. But it was there that he discovered the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) — an organization, he said, where “race, color, background, income meant nothing.”

When he traveled to Fort

Benning, Ga., in 1958 for basic training, there was only one motel on the way that would accept Black guests. But at Fort Benning, he found what he described as an “integrated society” where no one cared about the color of his skin, only what kind of soldier he could become. “The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America,” he wrote in his autobiography “My American Journey,” and his military service “made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all my heart.” Over the course of his remarkable career, he broke barrier after barrier — becoming the first Black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state.

Yes, he told the Howard University students, racism still exists. But he urged them to always remember that “racism is a disease of the racist. Never let it become yours.” He exhorted them not to allow “the dying hand of racism to rest on your shoulder, weighing you down. Always let racism always be someone else’s burden to carry in their heart.”

Today, the American family is breaking into warring factions over race. That is not what Powell wanted. To his last days, he refused to give in to factionalism. Earlier this year, in one of his last extended interviews, Powell visited George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, where David Rubenstein asked what he thought of the Black Lives Matter movement. “Black lives matter. But you want to know something? All lives matter,” Powell replied. “We have to think about all Americans.

Black Lives Matter is resting on sound ground. But I can’t just look at Black Lives Matter; I have to look at White lives matter too.”

He explained that when he talks to young people, he tells them not to blame external forces for the difficulties they face. We all fail, he said, and when you do, focus on “how to fix yourself, not to start pointing fingers at people.” And never forget, he added, that in America anything is possible: “How the devil did I become secretary of state or a four-star general or commander of the largest group of soldiers in the United States Army?”

He’s right. Only in America would Colin Powell’s life have been possible. May he rest in peace — and may his example of unity and patriotism live on.