October 19, 2021
The Black world should be mourning the death of the first African American Secretary of State for the United States, Colin Powell. I said should be mourning because for most of his political career he was a republican. While that shouldn’t matter because he broke the ceiling for every other Black leader at the top on both sides of the political divide, let’s hope that many can divorce his politics and evaluate him on the merits of his achievements.
He was a trusted voice for the international community. Well respected and looked up to by people around the world. A face of reassurance in the last 50 years only comparable to his former boss Donald Rumsfeld. As much maligned as the latter was, everyone knew he was at least competent and had a grasp on leadership on a macro level and was expected to be president of the US one day. But his attitude got the better of him, as he was abusive to the point he would make hardened military men cry and simper in heaps of quivering flesh.
Powell was being groomed to be the first Black President of the US too, however his career was severely derailed by the impasse on the whole nuclear weapons matter in Iraq, which sunk any further ambitions before he even had a chance to out and declare any further intentions.
People will look back at his involvement in invading Iraq for the second time with mixed reviews in the next 50 years but it will be remembered as something that America needed to do to put fear in the hearts of the terrorists. Yellow cake or no!
Powell paved the way for Barack Obama and any other person of colour who took the top spot in America. He was a face that Black America needed to see at the top, clean, trustworthy, confident and reliable. A Jamaican by heritage, let us not forget that.
Maybe it was his military training that formed the man we knew, but we send special thanks to his family for allowing to share his life with the rest of the world with integrity in service.
Colin Powell, sunrise April 5, 1937 to sunset, October 18, 2021. May he rest in peace.