Colin Luther Powell was born on April 5, 1937 in Harlem, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan in 1937 to Jamaican immigrant parents Luther Theophilus Powell and Maud Arial McKoy and was raised in the South Bronx. He also has Scottish, Irish, and other ancestries.
Powell attended Morris High School, a former public school in The Bronx, New York City, from which he graduated in 1954. While in school, he worked a local shop where he picked up Yiddish from the shopkeepers and some of the customers. He remembers some of his Yiddish to this day. He gained a bachelor's degree in geology from City College of New York attaining a "C" average, according to his 2006 graduation address at Marymount University. He later obtained an MBA from The George Washington University after his second tour in Vietnam in 1971. In 1962, he married Alma, who is now the co-chair of America's Promise. He is the father of Michael Powell, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission (Michael Powell was known mostly for a public battle with radio host Howard Stern).
Powell's first name is fairly common in the United Kingdom and Ireland but rare in the United States. He pronounces his name "KOH-lin." Public officials and radio and television reporters have used Powell's preferred pronunciation.
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