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Sunday, January 18, 2004 ![]()
WASHINGTON — Secretary of
State Colin Powell (search) remembers the first time that he, as a
young black Army officer, was allowed to buy a hamburger at a drive-in
joint in Phenix City, Ala. He credits Martin Luther King for the law that
let him do it.
It was July 1964, when the Civil Rights Act
(search) 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 (search) 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 chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation's highest-ranking soldier, attributed
his career not only to King but to the civil rights leader's lieutenants
including Jesse Jackson and Ralph Abernathy. Also, he said, black soldiers
who fought thanklessly for their country: the post-Civil War Buffalo
Soldiers on the American frontier; and the Tuskegee Airmen, the Triple
Nickel Parachute Battalion and the Montford Point Marines of World War II.
"All of them went and served their nation over a period
of close to 300 years of military service in this country when they were
... asked to give blood for the nation but were not going to get the
privileges of being citizens of this nation," Powell said.
"But they did it anyway. They did it anyway in the
certainty that sooner or later right would triumph and our Constitution
would be made whole."
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