Powell Gives Credit to Black Pioneers

WASHINGTON —  Secretary of State Colin L. Powell remembers the first time when, as a young black Army officer, he was allowed to buy a hamburger at a drive-in joint in Phenix City, Ala. He credits the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the law that let him do it.

It was July 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, “and I was able to go to the drive-in hamburger stand that had denied me service just a few weeks earlier [and] that now had to serve me,” Powell said in an interview aired Sunday. “I’ll never forget that particular day.... And no one deserves greater credit for bringing about that day and that act than Dr. King.”

Powell was interviewed for a syndicated television program on King titled “We Have a Dream,” reminiscent of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

That speech, Powell said, “was essentially a mirror placed in the face of the nation, and that speech said: ‘Look at yourselves; look at us; look at who we are and what we are, and let’s all have this dream.’ And with that speech, he convinced all of America that what we had been doing was wrong and that things had to change.”

Powell, whose last military job was as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking soldier, attributed the success of his career not only to King but to civil rights leaders including Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy, and to black soldiers who fought for their country: the post-Civil War Buffalo Soldiers on the American frontier, the Tuskegee Airmen, the “Triple Nickel” parachute battalion and the Montford Point Marines of World War II.