Colin Powell: Commencement Address at Howard University

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Powell begins by establishing an informal, almost humorous tone to his remarks by pointing out how difficult it is to gauge the appropriate length of a graduation speech. Students want a short speech, he observes, while faculty are usually content with a longer address. Parents, because they have so much invested in their children’s graduation, in both real and psychic terms, want to bask in the full glow of a lengthy address. He ends these preliminary remarks by asking for frequent applause early on, and in return he promises to keep his speech brief. He quips that if there is no applause, or infrequent applause, then his address is likely to be much longer. In his words, “If you … applaud a lot early on, you get a nice, short speech. If you make me work for it, we’re liable to be here a long time.”

Free Speech and Race Hatred

But Powell moves quickly—almost abruptly—into the serious part of his text by announcing clearly that his speech will address the controversial nature of Howard University’s free speech policy, a policy that had attracted national attention when Howard administrators allowed black militant and self-proclaimed “truth terrorist” Khalid Muhammad to speak on campus barely a month earlier. Powell never mentions Muhammad or any other participant in the Howard free speech controversy by name, but his intentions are obvious. As he so disarmingly puts it, “Since many people have been giving advice about how to handle this matter, I thought I might as well too.” Not surprisingly, he briefly reviews Howard University’s distinguished service to the African American community as its most prestigious and largest institution of higher learning and quickly reassures his listeners that in his view Howard would continue its tradition of excellence despite the recent controversy. What Powell wisely avoided, however, was pointing out that Howard did face an uncertain future. For one thing, it could no longer count on automatically attracting the best and the brightest black students, as it had in the past, because the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s had opened the doors of competitive white colleges and universities to black applicants—both faculty and students. The unintended result was a kind of brain drain that threatened to alter the unique and privileged status of Howard in black educational circles. But in this speech and to this audience, Powell diplomatically focused on the subject of race hatred and free speech, which had brought the institution unwanted public attention and embarrassing criticism. A year later he would have to confront other challenges to Howard’s status as a member of its board of trustees.

Powell is careful to reassure his listeners that the university’s position in support of the principle of free speech is one that he endorses. Without mentioning the fact that the outgoing president was widely criticized in the white press for allowing Muhammad to speak, Powell is obviously supportive of the institution’s policy. As he puts it, “I have every confidence in the ability of the administration, the faculty and the students of Howard to determine who should speak on this campus. No outside help needed, thank you.” Later, in the middle of his script, he reiterates his support of Howard by saying that “I believe with all my heart that Howard must continue to serve as an institute of learning excellence where freedom of speech is strongly encouraged and rigorously protected. That is the very essence of a great university and Howard is a great university.” Powell carefully omitted from his text the fact that the university had cancelled the appearance of a white Yale University professor, David Brion Davis, who intended to refute the claims of Khalid. Howard administrators said that in blocking Davis’s speech they acted only to protect his personal safety, but critics condemned their actions as a violation of the principles of free speech that they claimed to uphold.

Powell avoids some troubled waters by artfully drawing a thin line between the support of free speech in philosophical terms and the dangers of accepting every opinion as truth. As he put it, the permission of the “widest range of views” should be matched by the responsibility of the university and its students “to make informed, educated judgments about what they hear.” His conclusion, which he draws carefully, goes to the heart of his whole point: “But for this freedom to hear all views, you bear a burden to sort out wisdom from foolishness.” Here, at the end of the first third of his remarks, Powell returns to a more conventional message that “there is great wisdom” in the old-fashioned virtues of diligence, hard work, and family values, but there “is utter foolishness, evil, and danger in the message of hatred, or of condoning violence, however cleverly the message is packaged.” These ideas form an important part of his worldview. Powell is essentially a racial optimist who is convinced that traditional values triumph. His own life story in the military convinced him that although race prejudice could be annoying and frustrating, excellence and success ultimately triumph. In many ways, these ideas form an important theme that runs through his remarkably candid autobiography in which he refused, in his words, “to be a victim of racism.”

Racial Cooperation

At the core of Powell’s Howard remarks is a brilliantly argued case for the triumph of racial cooperation over racial and ethnic hatred. His primary audience, of course, is those assembled at the graduation exercises, but there are at least two other groups to whom he is speaking. One of those is obviously the national press, whose following he had been courting—and would continue to do so for months to come. Another is Khalid Abdul Muhammad and his followers, to whom Powell never directly alludes, but his choice of words and his frame of argument are almost certainly aimed at their principles. Take, for instance, his example of the demise of South Africa’s system of apartheid and the election of the black activist Nelson Mandela as president of a new and racially liberated South Africa. In Powell’s speech, President Mandela becomes a South African Martin Luther King, Jr., by using “his liberation to work his former tormenters to create a new South Africa and to eliminate the curse of apartheid from the face of the earth. What a glorious example! What a glorious day it was!” Powell must have known, of course, that Khalid Muhammad had frequently referred to Mandela in his own speeches as an example of a black leader—like Jesse Jackson in the United States—who had been used as a tool by the white power structure to prevent full racial liberation and to create only the illusion of progress.

Powell uses the same rebuttal technique in his second example of the recently signed peace accord between the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, two seemingly intractable enemies whom Powell rather optimistically (and prematurely, it turns out) claims have tried “to end hundreds of years of hatred and two generations of violence.” This Middle East settlement, Powell insists, created “a force of moral authority more powerful than any army.” Powell, of course, was fully aware that Khalid Muhammad had savaged Jews time and again as the enemies of world peace, and his use of the Middle East peace accord was intended as another rejection of Muhammad’s anti-Semitism. For Powell, these two examples prove that for African Americans the “future lies in the philosophy of love and understanding and caring and building. Not of hatred and tearing down.”

The instance of racial cooperation to which Powell devotes most of his speech is that of the Buffalo Soldiers, a contingent of black cavalry in the U.S. Army who had distinguished themselves in a series of military engagements in the post–Civil War West. His discussion of the Buffalo Soldiers allows Powell to touch on several points that are central to his Howard message. Powell’s connection to the Buffalo Soldiers is, of course, his own service in the military and more directly in his personal efforts to establish a national monument in their honor. In a rather impassioned sentence of the speech, he argues that the military gave him and his forbears—including the Buffalo Soldiers, the Tuskegee Airmen, and other black men and women––the chance to demonstrate their ability when given the opportunity. “I climbed on their backs,” he exclaimed, “and stood on their shoulders to reach the top of my chosen profession.” Furthermore, he reminds his audience, the Buffalo Soldiers were formed in 1867, the same year that Howard was founded. Similarly, both were begun and directed in their infancy by well-meaning and right-minded whites who were essential to the survival of both enterprises. This same interracial cooperation, Powell asserts, was instrumental in his own success in the military and, in some ways, in the achievements of the Howard class of 1994 as well.

Patriotic and Ethnic Pride

Powell’s patriotic conclusion is aimed most directly at his young black listeners and perhaps secondarily to the black community at large: “Never lose faith in America,” he says. “America is a family. There may be differences and disputes in the family, but we must not allow the family to be broken into warring factions.” By all means, he instructs the graduates, retain “your heritage.” He continues:

Study your origins. Teach your children racial pride.… Not as a way of drawing back from American society and its European roots. But as a way of showing that there are other roots as well. African and Caribbean roots that are also a source of nourishment for the American family tree.… From the diversity of our people let us draw strength and not cause weakness.

And he concludes. “Believe in America with all your heart and soul and mind. It remains the ‘last best hope of Earth.’”