Colin Powell: Commencement Address at Howard University

Glossary

• Ambassador Annenberg Walter Annenberg, an American publisher, philanthropist, and diplomat who in 1990 had donated $50 million to the United Negro College Fund
• apartheid the legal system of racial segregation in South Africa
• controversy over Howard's speaking policy a reference to a recent controversy involving Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who had appeared on campus and expressed extreme, racially inflammatory views
• DeKlerk President F. W. de Klerk, who ended apartheid in South Africa and played a key role in turning the country into a multiracial democracy
• Dr. King civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Gaza and Jericho regions in Israel that have been the focus of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians
• Golden Thirteen the first African American commissioned and warrant officers in the U.S. Navy, commissioned in 1944
• “Great Expectations” the title of a novel by the nineteenth-century British writer Charles Dickens
• “last best hope of Earth” a quotation from Abraham Lincoln's 1862 Annual Message to Congress
• Montford Point Marines the first African Americans who entered the U.S. Marine Corps from 1942 to 1949 at Montford Point Camp in North Carolina
• PLO Chairman Arafat Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization
• President Mandela Nelson Mandela, who became the president of South Africa after the end of apartheid
• Prime Minister Rabin Yitzhak Rabin of Israel
• Tuskegee Airmen the 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps, the first black pilots in U.S. military history, based in Tuskegee, Alabama