Dr. Sweet NUPE
New Member
I would like to understand why you equated these two individuals?
Colin Powell was born in New York City on April 5, 1937. General Powell served as the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, from October 1, 1989 to September 30, 1993, under both President George Bush and President Bill Clinton.
The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell was raised in the South Bronx. He was educated in the New York City public schools, and at City College of New York (CCNY). He participated in ROTC at CCNY and received a commission as an Army second lieutenant upon graduation. He subsequently received a Master of Business Administration degree from George Washington University.
Powell served two tours of duty in Vietnam, and as a battalion commander in Korea. He later commanded the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Asssault) and V Corps, United States Army, Europe. Prior to being named as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he served as the Commander in Chief, Forces Command, headquartered at Fort McPherson, Georgia.
General Powell has been the recipient of numerous U.S. military decorations, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Bronze Star Medal, and the Purple Heart. His civilian awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and an honorary knighthood (Knight Commander of the Bath) from the Queen of England. He retired from the U.S. Army in 1993.
General Powell was selected by President George W. Bush as his Secrerary of State in January, 2001. Powell is the first African-American to hold this high office in the United States Government.
Powell is also chairman of America's Promise, an organization that challenges Americans to scale up their investment in youth, and committed to making America's youth a national priority. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Howard University, and of the Board of Directors of the United Negro College Fund. He serves on the Board of Governors of The Boys & Girls Clubs of America and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Children's Health Fund.
Secretary Powell is married to the former Alma Vivian Johnson of Birmingham, Alabama. The Powell family includes son Michael and daughters Linda and Annemarie; daughter-in-law Jane, and grandsons Jeffrey and Bryan.
CLARENCE THOMAS was born June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, an enclave of 500 inhabitants south of Savannah on the Moon River. Named after the plantation that once stood on the land, Pin Point had been divided up after the Civil War and given to the former slaves. In that marshy, dirt-poor community, which had neither sewers nor paved roads, most people worked for a few cents a day cleaning crabs and shucking oysters.
Young Clarence was the second child and first son of Leola Williams and M. C. Thomas. Clarence?s father abandoned the family when he was two and his mother was pregnant with her third child. She managed to keep the family together by working as a maid, clothing her children in hand-me-downs donated to their Baptist church. After the wooden house they lived in burned down and their mother remarried, Clarence and his brother went to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, in Savannah.
An ardent Catholic, loyal Democrat, and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Anderson had a profound influence on Thomas's upbringing and character. In a time when African-Americans were forced to the backs of buses, banned from restaurants, and denied employment opportunities, Anderson decided the only way to beat racism was to work for himself. He developed a flourishing business delivering wood, coal, ice, and heating oil from the back of a pick-up truck. As a result, he was able to provide his grandsons with a comfortable home, including things most people take for granted, such as three meals a day and indoor plumbing.
A strict but loving man, Anderson admonished his grandsons to work hard in school. He enrolled them in St. Benedict the Moor, an all-black grammar school run by white nuns. The nuns were strict disciplinarians who pushed their students to achieve their greatest potential. After school Thomas and his brother worked for their grandfather making fuel deliveries. Thomas later recalled how his grandparents had impressed on him that "school, discipline, hard work and 'right-from-wrong' were of the highest priority."
Because his grandfather wanted him to become a priest, Thomas left his black parochial high school after two years to attend a Catholic boarding school just outside Savannah. The only African-American in his class at St. John Vianney Minor Seminary, Thomas suffered from the bigotry of many students, but managed to excel academically. At lights out a classmate would tease, "Smile, Clarence, so we can see you, " he later recalled. In 1967 Thomas entered Immaculate Conception Seminary in northwestern Missouri to prepare for the priesthood. The prejudice he encountered there convinced him to quit a school that did not practice what it preached. The last straw was a fellow student's delight at hearing the news that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been slain.
Thomas worked for a while before making his way in 1968 to Holy Cross, a Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Holy Cross had begun an ambitious black recruitment program in the wake of the King assassination and attracted more than a few black students that year. Thomas helped found the Black Student Union, which decided in its second year that its members should live together in one dormitory. Thomas was the lone dissenter in the vote, preferring, as he later explained, to "profit from the experience by learning to associate [with] and understand the white majority." Thomas gave in, but brought his white roommate from the previous year to live with him. During college Thomas participated in a free breakfast program for local schoolchildren and was a Black Panthers sympathizer.
Thomas graduated ninth in his class in 1971 with an English honors degree. The day following graduation he married Kathy Grace Ambush, a student at a nearby Catholic women's college. Two years later she gave birth to their son, Jamal. By then Thomas was enrolled at Yale Law School, having been accepted, in part, under an affirmative action plan to recruit qualified minorities. It troubled Thomas that he was the beneficiary of such a plan. He later explained, "You had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn't deserve to be there on merit." He sat in the back row in his classes so as not to be given special treatment because of his race. To prove his abilities outside the sphere of traditional black issues, he took courses in tax and antitrust law instead of civil rights and constitutional law.
Graduating in 1974, Thomas joined the staff of the attorney general of Missouri, John Danforth, a young Republican who would become his political mentor. The only African-American in the office, Thomas requested to work in tax law, not civil rights. When Danforth was elected to the Senate in 1977, Thomas took a job in the private sector, at Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical company. His work there primarily consisted of shepherding pesticides through government registration.
After two and a half years Thomas decided to go to Washington and work in politics. He joined Senator Danforth's staff as a legislative assistant in charge of energy and environmental projects, once again purposefully staying clear of black issues. At the same time, Thomas became active in the black conservative movement, which believes that welfare, busing, affirmative action programs, and government set-asides make African-Americans dependent on government charity and do more harm than good. He did not view integration as a solution. Instead, he reasoned, African-Americans should help themselves through education, enterprise, work, and self-reliance.
In 1981 the new administration of President Ronald Reagan took notice of the rising young conservative and appointed him assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department. Thomas said in a 1987 speech, "I had, initially, resisted and declined taking the position of assistant secretary for civil rights simply because my career was not in civil rights and I had no intention of moving into this area... I always found it curious that even though my background was in energy, taxation, and general corporate regulatory matters, that I was not seriously sought after to move into one of these areas." After only ten months in the job, Reagan promoted him to be the director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
As the head enforcer of federal laws against discrimination in the workplace, Thomas did not have an easy time. At first, the Reagan administration found him too independent-minded, but in the course of his nearly eight years on the job he generally supported the administration?s opposition to the use of numerical goals and timetables for bringing suits against companies that did not hire enough minorities. Democrats and civil rights groups attacked the EEOC's move away from these traditional remedies to discrimination. Defending the administration?s position, Thomas once asked a congressional committee whether anyone would ever suggest that primarily white Georgetown University should be made to recruit white basketball players. He privately argued that, although racial preference programs enable a few qualified African-Americans to achieve, they do not help the majority.
In keeping with its reluctance to enforce goals and timetables, the EEOC under Thomas also largely abandoned the use of class action suits that relied on statistical evidence to prove widespread discrimination at corporations, preferring to focus on individual suits instead. Many credit Thomas with improving morale at the agency and making it more efficient. Others criticize him for letting 9,000 age discrimination complaints lapse, an inaction he has admitted was the "single most devastating event" of his tenure.
During this time he had personal difficulties as well. His grandfather died in 1983. Two years earlier Thomas and his wife had separated. They were divorced in 1984, and he kept custody of his son. At a conference in 1986 Thomas met Virginia Lamp, a spokesperson for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They were married five months later at a ceremony in her native Nebraska; Jamal was his father's best man. Long active in Republican politics, Virginia Thomas is a senior aide to Rep. Dick Armey, the House majority leader.
On July 1, 1991, George Bush selected Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American member of the Supreme Court. Many civil rights groups, notably the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus, declared that they would not support Thomas because of his opposition to the traditional civil rights agenda. His endorsement by African-American conservatives focused increased attention, however, on the diversity of African-American politics.
As the full Senate was about to vote on Thomas's confirmation, a sensational story broke. The press was leaked information regarding an FBI report, which the Judiciary Committee had been shown, alleging that Thomas had sexually harassed a former employee at the EEOC. University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, who had made the allegation, was brought in for questioning by the Judiciary Committee, and the hearings were reopened amid a flurry of controversy. Hill, also an African-American and a Yale Law School graduate, outlined her allegations in detail in nationally televised hearings. Thomas categorically denied the charges, calling the ordeal "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." The Senate voted to confirm Thomas on October 15, 1991, by a vote of 52 to 48, the closest confirmation vote in this century's history.
Colin Powell was born in New York City on April 5, 1937. General Powell served as the 12th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, from October 1, 1989 to September 30, 1993, under both President George Bush and President Bill Clinton.
The son of Jamaican immigrants, Powell was raised in the South Bronx. He was educated in the New York City public schools, and at City College of New York (CCNY). He participated in ROTC at CCNY and received a commission as an Army second lieutenant upon graduation. He subsequently received a Master of Business Administration degree from George Washington University.
Powell served two tours of duty in Vietnam, and as a battalion commander in Korea. He later commanded the 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Asssault) and V Corps, United States Army, Europe. Prior to being named as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he served as the Commander in Chief, Forces Command, headquartered at Fort McPherson, Georgia.
General Powell has been the recipient of numerous U.S. military decorations, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Bronze Star Medal, and the Purple Heart. His civilian awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and an honorary knighthood (Knight Commander of the Bath) from the Queen of England. He retired from the U.S. Army in 1993.
General Powell was selected by President George W. Bush as his Secrerary of State in January, 2001. Powell is the first African-American to hold this high office in the United States Government.
Powell is also chairman of America's Promise, an organization that challenges Americans to scale up their investment in youth, and committed to making America's youth a national priority. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Howard University, and of the Board of Directors of the United Negro College Fund. He serves on the Board of Governors of The Boys & Girls Clubs of America and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Children's Health Fund.
Secretary Powell is married to the former Alma Vivian Johnson of Birmingham, Alabama. The Powell family includes son Michael and daughters Linda and Annemarie; daughter-in-law Jane, and grandsons Jeffrey and Bryan.
CLARENCE THOMAS was born June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, an enclave of 500 inhabitants south of Savannah on the Moon River. Named after the plantation that once stood on the land, Pin Point had been divided up after the Civil War and given to the former slaves. In that marshy, dirt-poor community, which had neither sewers nor paved roads, most people worked for a few cents a day cleaning crabs and shucking oysters.
Young Clarence was the second child and first son of Leola Williams and M. C. Thomas. Clarence?s father abandoned the family when he was two and his mother was pregnant with her third child. She managed to keep the family together by working as a maid, clothing her children in hand-me-downs donated to their Baptist church. After the wooden house they lived in burned down and their mother remarried, Clarence and his brother went to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, in Savannah.
An ardent Catholic, loyal Democrat, and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Anderson had a profound influence on Thomas's upbringing and character. In a time when African-Americans were forced to the backs of buses, banned from restaurants, and denied employment opportunities, Anderson decided the only way to beat racism was to work for himself. He developed a flourishing business delivering wood, coal, ice, and heating oil from the back of a pick-up truck. As a result, he was able to provide his grandsons with a comfortable home, including things most people take for granted, such as three meals a day and indoor plumbing.
A strict but loving man, Anderson admonished his grandsons to work hard in school. He enrolled them in St. Benedict the Moor, an all-black grammar school run by white nuns. The nuns were strict disciplinarians who pushed their students to achieve their greatest potential. After school Thomas and his brother worked for their grandfather making fuel deliveries. Thomas later recalled how his grandparents had impressed on him that "school, discipline, hard work and 'right-from-wrong' were of the highest priority."
Because his grandfather wanted him to become a priest, Thomas left his black parochial high school after two years to attend a Catholic boarding school just outside Savannah. The only African-American in his class at St. John Vianney Minor Seminary, Thomas suffered from the bigotry of many students, but managed to excel academically. At lights out a classmate would tease, "Smile, Clarence, so we can see you, " he later recalled. In 1967 Thomas entered Immaculate Conception Seminary in northwestern Missouri to prepare for the priesthood. The prejudice he encountered there convinced him to quit a school that did not practice what it preached. The last straw was a fellow student's delight at hearing the news that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been slain.
Thomas worked for a while before making his way in 1968 to Holy Cross, a Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Holy Cross had begun an ambitious black recruitment program in the wake of the King assassination and attracted more than a few black students that year. Thomas helped found the Black Student Union, which decided in its second year that its members should live together in one dormitory. Thomas was the lone dissenter in the vote, preferring, as he later explained, to "profit from the experience by learning to associate [with] and understand the white majority." Thomas gave in, but brought his white roommate from the previous year to live with him. During college Thomas participated in a free breakfast program for local schoolchildren and was a Black Panthers sympathizer.
Thomas graduated ninth in his class in 1971 with an English honors degree. The day following graduation he married Kathy Grace Ambush, a student at a nearby Catholic women's college. Two years later she gave birth to their son, Jamal. By then Thomas was enrolled at Yale Law School, having been accepted, in part, under an affirmative action plan to recruit qualified minorities. It troubled Thomas that he was the beneficiary of such a plan. He later explained, "You had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn't deserve to be there on merit." He sat in the back row in his classes so as not to be given special treatment because of his race. To prove his abilities outside the sphere of traditional black issues, he took courses in tax and antitrust law instead of civil rights and constitutional law.
Graduating in 1974, Thomas joined the staff of the attorney general of Missouri, John Danforth, a young Republican who would become his political mentor. The only African-American in the office, Thomas requested to work in tax law, not civil rights. When Danforth was elected to the Senate in 1977, Thomas took a job in the private sector, at Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical company. His work there primarily consisted of shepherding pesticides through government registration.
After two and a half years Thomas decided to go to Washington and work in politics. He joined Senator Danforth's staff as a legislative assistant in charge of energy and environmental projects, once again purposefully staying clear of black issues. At the same time, Thomas became active in the black conservative movement, which believes that welfare, busing, affirmative action programs, and government set-asides make African-Americans dependent on government charity and do more harm than good. He did not view integration as a solution. Instead, he reasoned, African-Americans should help themselves through education, enterprise, work, and self-reliance.
In 1981 the new administration of President Ronald Reagan took notice of the rising young conservative and appointed him assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department. Thomas said in a 1987 speech, "I had, initially, resisted and declined taking the position of assistant secretary for civil rights simply because my career was not in civil rights and I had no intention of moving into this area... I always found it curious that even though my background was in energy, taxation, and general corporate regulatory matters, that I was not seriously sought after to move into one of these areas." After only ten months in the job, Reagan promoted him to be the director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
As the head enforcer of federal laws against discrimination in the workplace, Thomas did not have an easy time. At first, the Reagan administration found him too independent-minded, but in the course of his nearly eight years on the job he generally supported the administration?s opposition to the use of numerical goals and timetables for bringing suits against companies that did not hire enough minorities. Democrats and civil rights groups attacked the EEOC's move away from these traditional remedies to discrimination. Defending the administration?s position, Thomas once asked a congressional committee whether anyone would ever suggest that primarily white Georgetown University should be made to recruit white basketball players. He privately argued that, although racial preference programs enable a few qualified African-Americans to achieve, they do not help the majority.
In keeping with its reluctance to enforce goals and timetables, the EEOC under Thomas also largely abandoned the use of class action suits that relied on statistical evidence to prove widespread discrimination at corporations, preferring to focus on individual suits instead. Many credit Thomas with improving morale at the agency and making it more efficient. Others criticize him for letting 9,000 age discrimination complaints lapse, an inaction he has admitted was the "single most devastating event" of his tenure.
During this time he had personal difficulties as well. His grandfather died in 1983. Two years earlier Thomas and his wife had separated. They were divorced in 1984, and he kept custody of his son. At a conference in 1986 Thomas met Virginia Lamp, a spokesperson for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They were married five months later at a ceremony in her native Nebraska; Jamal was his father's best man. Long active in Republican politics, Virginia Thomas is a senior aide to Rep. Dick Armey, the House majority leader.
On July 1, 1991, George Bush selected Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American member of the Supreme Court. Many civil rights groups, notably the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus, declared that they would not support Thomas because of his opposition to the traditional civil rights agenda. His endorsement by African-American conservatives focused increased attention, however, on the diversity of African-American politics.
As the full Senate was about to vote on Thomas's confirmation, a sensational story broke. The press was leaked information regarding an FBI report, which the Judiciary Committee had been shown, alleging that Thomas had sexually harassed a former employee at the EEOC. University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, who had made the allegation, was brought in for questioning by the Judiciary Committee, and the hearings were reopened amid a flurry of controversy. Hill, also an African-American and a Yale Law School graduate, outlined her allegations in detail in nationally televised hearings. Thomas categorically denied the charges, calling the ordeal "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." The Senate voted to confirm Thomas on October 15, 1991, by a vote of 52 to 48, the closest confirmation vote in this century's history.
