For Colin Powell, it all came back to City College, where a Bronx kid was launched on a tuition-free springboard that would lead to him becoming America’s top general and top diplomat. As Powell said in a presentation for CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership just weeks ago, “CCNY was always the center of my life.”
The son of Jamaican immigrants, he and his older sister were raised on Kelly St. between Westchester Ave. and 163rd St. in the working-class Bronx, a swath of the city thick with immigrants, mostly Jews. His family went to St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, but public school was for everyone, and when he wasn’t at PS 39 or Thomas Knowlton Junior High JHS 52 or Morris High School, Colin played stickball and handball and rode his bike. His first job was as a Shabbos goy, turning off the shul’s lights for a quarter.
One day the proprietor of Sickser’s baby furniture store said, “Oy, kid, you want you should work for an hour or two?” And for seven years until he went into the Army, Powell worked there. As he recounted: “One evening Mr. Sickser said something to me that I will never forget. I never had to write it down. One of the most important things I’ve ever heard: ‘Kid, I want I should tell you something. You cannot stay here. I do not want you to think that you have a future here in this store. I want you should think what schools you going to go to. You must go to school. I don’t know where you’re going to go, but you’re not staying here.’”
That school was CCNY, where Powell’s C grades turned around when he joined ROTC, rising to lead the Cadet Corps and the Pershing Rifles, and on June 9, 1958, 2nd Lt. Powell graduated and earned his commission.
In recent years, Powell has helped rebuild CCNY — one of many ways this decent and humble and earnest man worked tirelessly to give others the same chance he got.