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Message: [QUOTE="Fairfield Fan, post: 1795382, member: 6911"] Colin Powell became the country's first chief of staff of the military. Yet he would not have become a general had the discrimination that held him and other African-Americans back been eliminated. Here's a Times column by the former secretary of the army during the Carter administration, Clifford Alexander: [URL="http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/23/opinion/colin-powell-s-promotion-the-real-story.html"]Colin Powell's Promotion: The Real Story[/URL] "Mr. Powell and several other black colonels received their first stars while I was Secretary of the Army, from 1977 to 1981. All of those black men, and one black woman, were as qualified to move up the chain of command as their white colleagues. They all served their nation with distinction. I did not promote these black people to the rank of general officer through an Army- or Cliff Alexander-invented affirmative action plan. "But those promotions, including Colin Powell's, did not just happen. At an early point in my tenure as Secretary, I held up a list of proposed general officers because no black colonels had been promoted, even though many had achieved that rank and served with distinction. I met with the General Officer Board, and other boards subsequent to the first one, and gave them a series of instructions. "They were told to look back at the early records of the eligible black colonels to see if their ratings in past years had been in any way influenced by the prejudices of the rating officers or if they had received lesser assignments or had been kept out of command positions because of the racial predisposition of any assigning superior officer. If such inconsistency was found, the board was instructed to eliminate the unfair rating and judge the people, both black and white, only by fair and equitable criteria. "The boards followed my directives, and the result was equity and fairness. Black people with sterling records emerged on those lists. Yes, Colin Powell was like his white fellow generals -- no better, no worse. He did not get anything extra -- but more important, his white colleagues did not get anything extra either." [/QUOTE]

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