Powell makes it easy to focus on the good things in the family heritage. He embodies honor, leadership, morality; and, not coincidentally, he also reflects racial progress. Powell acknowleged that when, in declining to enter the presidential contest, he observed, “In one generation we have moved from denying a black man service at a lunch counter to elevating one to the highest military office in the nation and to being a serious contender for the presidency.” He went on to declare, “This is a magnificent country, and I am proud to be one of its sons.”
No one with a sense of U.S. history could argue with Powell’s point, or question his standing to celebrate the magnificence of America’s advances. So why, in the face of such obvious progress, did hundreds of thousands (perhaps as many as a million) of America’s other black sons answer Farrakhan’s call to assemble on the Washington Mall? They certainly did not come in rejection of Powell. In fact, some three fourths who attended, according to an unscientific Washington Post survey, had a “favorable impression” of the retired general. Nonetheless, they came to hear a message that was at odds with much of what Powell has come to represent, from a messenger rooted in the rhetoric of tribalism, in the rage against racial oppression.
The reasons were many, most having less to do with devotion to Farrakhan than with an eagerness to respond to a perceived moral and economic meltdown in America’s black communities. But even though most who marched were not Farrakhan disciples, they were, in large measure, Farrakhan admirers. It was impossible to stand among the thousands in attendance and not feel the warmth radiating in the Muslim minister’s direction. “He’s a strong brother who’s not afraid to speak the truth,” was the essence of the answer many people gave when asked why they had answered his invitation. Even if they did not accept Farrakhan’s version of the “truth” or condone his scapegoating of others (most conspicuously, of Jews), they found something irresistibly attractive in his unbought, unbossed, defiantly unbowed persona.
Powell’s appeal is of an altogether different sort. Still, I find myself wondering how many people would have come to Washington if Powell had summoned them. And what would they have been prepared to do? In other words, what was Powell’s president-size popularity all about? Was it based on an assumption that a vote for Powell would mean a triumph of racial conciliation over conflict? Did it reflect a desire for fundamental political and social change? Or was it rooted in a need for reassurance that too much change was not required–that, at least as far as it concerns blacks, America had finally delivered on its promises?
For generations, black Americans, with very few exceptions, have believed that blacks would be allowed to go only so far in the United States. And for generations, there was never much reason to doubt the belief was anything but true. That perception provided fertile ground for pessimism and anger and gave the ring of truth to the words of self-declared prophets, like Farrakhan, who explained that the doctrine of “white supremacy” was the key to understanding the Western world.
Before the onset of Powellmania, writer Trey Ellis complained, “Increasingly, America seems to be painting us into two corners. In one, we’re the monsters they’ve always said we were. In the other corner, we’re free but all those other black men are monsters; we are anointed honorary whites so long as we abandon every trace of our ethnicity.” He speculated that regardless of how hard a black person worked and studied, the highest achievement one could anticipate was perhaps to be vice president of the United States. “How can you expect someone to dedicate his life to training for the Olympics if all he can hope for is a silver medal?” he asked. Dennis F. Hightower, president of Walt Disney Television & Telecommunications and one of the nation’s highest-ranking black executives, recently made a similar point: “In the United States, it’s still the case that people tend to see color before capability.”
All the hullabaloo about Powell did not make much of a dent in such perceptions. To the contrary, one reason support for Powell among blacks was lukewarm (an October USA Today poll, for instance, found that only 25 percent of blacks preferred Powell over President Clinton, compared with 54 percent of whites) is that many doubted he would be allowed to succeed. Untold numbers believed–as one highly accomplished educator told me–that whites were less than serious about Powell’s candicacy. As proof, some pointed to the increasingly virulent denunciations of Powell by conservatives as the general’s self-imposed deadline for making a decision approached.
Even had Powell run and won, many blacks would have remained convinced that America is irremediably hostile to outsize black ambitions; for the bitterness and the history that undergird that belief have built up over generations. But a Powell victory would have been an irrefutable sign that the rules had changed. And it would have been received as important evidence that the road chosen by Powell might truly lead to a better future–and that Farrakhan’s path could soon be relegated to the past.
The pity is that Powell did not put the assumptions to the test. The tragedy is that so few other success stories like Powell’s are visible, and that one man’s decision had to bear such weight.
