“I’ll send you a telegram with my best wishes.”īut when he found out his daughter and son-in-law – an interracial couple from Buffalo, New York – would brave the trip to the South for the wedding, he had to rethink his stance. “You wouldn’t catch me dead in Birmingham,” Luther Powell is quoted as saying in his son’s book. Powell’s father was so wary of the racial conflict in Alabama at the time, he threatened not to go to the wedding in her hometown. Kennedy ordered Powell to go to Vietnam as part of a group of advisers, he proposed to his girlfriend. Her father was an influential principal at a Birmingham school for Black students in the 1960s, a time when the state was in the throes of the civil rights movement.īy the summer of 1962, just before President John F. Compared to the segregation in the South, she was fascinated by the military’s social integration, Powell wrote. She met all his bachelor and couple friends in the military. His family loved Alma Johnson, and her feelings were mutual. “A well-bred girl from a proper Southern family needed to be exposed gradually to noisy, noisy, fun-loving West Indians,” Powell wrote in his autobiography. Parties at his house were loud and ran all night or until the rum dried out – whichever came first. She’d grown up in Birmingham, Alabama, while he was the son of Jamaican immigrants in New York’s Bronx borough. Powell was smitten – but he wasn’t sure how she’d fit into his loud, West Indian family. Before long, they were exclusive.Ĭolin Powell and his wife, Alma, met on a blind date in November 1961, and got married months later. A night of music, drinks and conversations about their professions led to a second date. She vanished into the bathroom, redid her makeup and changed her clothes, he wrote.Īt the time, she worked as an audiologist for the Boston Guild for the Hard of Hearing. She reluctantly agreed to the outing – but piled on makeup and wore weird clothes to repel any ideas of a future date.īut as soon as she peeked into the room and saw the shy, baby-faced soldier waiting to take her out, she was curious about him. “(She) moved gracefully and spoke graciously with a soft Southern accent.”Īlma Johnson wasn’t exactly thrilled about going out with a soldier, Powell wrote in the book. I was mesmerized by a pair of luminous eyes, an unusual shade of green,” he wrote. “She was fair-skinned with light brown hair and a lovely figure. That friend turned out to be Alma Johnson, and he was awestruck. But he decided to meet the friend nonetheless for a double date at a Boston club. In his autobiography, “My American Journey,” Powell recalls how his Army roommate, Michael Heningburg, asked him to “run interference” for him by entertaining a friend of a girl he was interested in.Īt the time, Powell preferred to be single. One blind date in November 1961 changed everything. Shawn Thew/Pool/Bloomberg/Getty Imagesīefore Powell left for Vietnam, he was a single soldier in his 20s trying to navigate relationships against the backdrop of military life. “To turn it down because one’s spouse objects to running is a testament to how much Colin Powell valued his marriage and how much he respected his wife’s opinion.”įormer Secretary of State Colin Powell has said the greatest person he's ever known is his wife, Alma Powell. “Being asked to run for president is probably the biggest stroke to one’s ego a person could possibly have,” Gillespie said. She cited Powell wife’s objection to his running for president in 1996 despite Republican pleas and polls in his favor.Īt the time, Alma Powell described the hate mail and random phone calls they received as her retired four-star general husband contemplated making a bid to become the nation’s first Black president. Their marriage demonstrated that love, respect and honor go hand in hand, said Andra Gillespie, an associate political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. But when journalist Bob Woodward asked him the greatest person he’s ever known, his answer, without hesitation, was his wife of over half a century. As a US Army general and statesman, he met some of the world’s most influential leaders. From the streets of New York to the Vietnam battlefields and the power corridors of Washington, Colin Powell broke racial barriers to become one of the nation’s top diplomats.īeside him all along was one quiet force: Alma Johnson Powell.Ĭolin Powell died at 84 this week of coronavirus complications after fighting cancer.
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