Alma Powell, a civic leader and widow of retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, the first Black national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, died July 28 at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. She was 86.
Washington
Alma Powell, civic leader and widow of Colin Powell, dies at 86
In a career mostly as a military spouse, Mrs. Powell also was a children’s book author and served on the board of America’s Promise Alliance, which focuses on civic engagement, education and workforce development.
She married Powell, then a lieutenant in the Army, shortly before he left for his first deployment to Vietnam in 1962. Her husband rose to the rank of general, becoming the first Black national security adviser in 1987 and the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989.
He retired from the military in 1993, was appointed secretary of state by President George W. Bush in 2001 and spent four often-beleaguered years in that job amid the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
The Powells moved more than 20 times during Colin Powell’s decades of active-duty service, and Mrs. Powell took a leading role helping other military families prepare for similar adjustments with their families. She was also a member of the Arlington Ladies, a group that attend funerals of service members at Arlington National Cemetery.
After her husband reentered civilian life, Mrs. Powell began to focus her energies more on education issues and improving children’s lives.
The couple were key to launching America’s Promise Alliance in 1997, and Mrs. Powell held several positions on its board, including her most recent post of chair emeritus. She also wrote two children’s books to support the mission of the organization, called “America’s Promise” and “My Little Red Wagon,” aimed at encouraging children to give back to their communities, according to publisher HarperCollins.
From 1989 to 2000, she was chair of the National Council of the Best Friends Foundation, which aims to improve the lives of young girls.
Mrs. Powell, who was appointed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board during Bill Clinton’s presidency, was also picked to be on an advisory board for historically Black colleges and universities in 2010 by President Barack Obama. She sat on many other boards and won service awards.
Alma Vivian Johnson, the eldest of two daughters, was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Oct. 27, 1937. Her father was the principal of one of Birmingham’s Black high schools, and her mother ran a day care, according to the obituary sent by Cifrino.
In 1957 she received a bachelor’s degree in speech and drama at Fisk University, a historically Black college in Nashville. She returned to her hometown and briefly hosted an afternoon radio show that played music and discussed household tips.
She soon relocated to Boston, where she studied speech pathology and audiology at Emerson College and worked for the Boston Guild for the Hard of Hearing by providing hearing tests, fitting veterans with hearing aids and teaching the deaf to read lips, according to the family obit. She was set up on a blind date with Colin Powell in 1961.
She was reluctant to go out with a soldier and told The Washington Post she purposefully overdid her makeup and put on an unflattering dress. But when she met him, the general wrote in his memoir, she decided he looked “like a little lost twelve-year-old” and changed both her mind and her dress. Colin Powell, meanwhile, wrote that he was “mesmerized by a pair of luminous eyes, an unusual shade of green.”
They married the next year, at the First Congregational Church in her hometown, and she did not complete her graduate education.
Survivors include three children, Michael, Linda and Annemarie; four grandchildren; and a great-grandson. Michael Powell, a lobbyist, served as Federal Communications Commission chairman under President George W. Bush.
Mrs. Powell supported her husband throughout his military career, but she was opposed to him running for president, The Post reported, and despite entreaties from leaders of both parties, he said he was unenthusiastic about campaigning for high office. He also acknowledged his wife’s struggle with clinical depression in 1995 after the diagnosis became public amid heated discussion of his political prospects.
Depression, he said in 1995, “is very easily controlled with proper medication, just as my blood pressure is sometimes under control with proper medication. … When the story broke, we confirmed it immediately, and I hope that people who read that story who think they might be suffering from depression make a beeline to the doctor.”
The Post’s Bob Woodward asked the former general a few months before his death, “Who was the greatest man, woman or person you have ever known?”
“It’s Alma Powell,” he said. “She was with me the whole time. We’ve been married 58 years. And she put up with a lot. She took care of the kids when I was, you know, running around. And she was always there for me and she’d tell me, ‘That’s not a good idea.’ She was usually right.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “on behalf of the Department of Education (ED),” on Monday released a Notice Inviting Grant Applications for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. Applications are due by May 29.
Last November, ED announced that it had entered into an interagency agreement with HHS to administer the CCAMPIS program. This is the first CCAMPIS competition conducted under this arrangement.
Approximately $73.5 million will go to institutions of higher education that awarded at least $250,000 in Pell grants to enrolled students in FY 2025. HHS will award about 148 grants, ranging from $150,000 to $1 million.
The terms of the grant competition are not significantly different than prior competitions. As before, there are two absolute grant priorities that every application must address – leveraging non-federal resources and utilizing a sliding-fee scale for low-income parents.
This year’s competition includes only one invitational priority that reflects the Trump administration’s general educational policy. The new priority, entitled “Expanding Education Choice in Early Learning Settings,” encourages applications that “expand access to education choice … including by empowering parents in choosing the early learning setting that best meets their family’s needs.” Flexible childcare programs that include drop-in care and care during nontraditional hours are also encouraged.
One other notable difference from prior competitions is an expanded “Terms and Conditions” section that not only requires compliance with applicable civil rights laws, but also refers to Trump administration Executive Orders and guidance on racial discrimination that clarify “the application of federal antidiscrimination laws to programs or initiatives that may involve discriminatory practices, including those labeled as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) programs.” This includes any “discriminatory equity ideology [as defined in Executive Order 14190] in violation of a federal antidiscrimination law.”
The exact scope of these terms is unclear because courts have not found many of the practices described in these Executive Orders and guidance documents to be violations of federal law.
The Newsfeed
This week, the team brings you stories about how communities including Filipino immigrants, Sephardic Jews and Somalis arrived in the Pacific Northwest
Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
Group hopes to boost recognition for Seattle’s Filipinotown
By Venice Buhain
The group Filipinotown Seattle hopes to make sure that the legacy of Filipino Americans in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District isn’t forgotten.
One of the group’s current projects is pushing for a Filipinotown placemarking sign in the CID.
“Filipino Americans have had a presence here for over 100 years in Seattle,” said Filipinotown Seattle Executive Director Devin Israel Cabanilla.
He said that the signage is important to remind people that “the International District is not just Chinatown. Japantown. Filipinotown is here as well.”
The group held a poll on what signage might look like and where it might be located. It would be similar to the Chinatown sign on South Jackson Street and Fifth Avenue South, or the Wing Luke Museum
In the early 20th century, the area now known as the CID was a hub full of businesses, entertainment, social groups and housing that served Seattle’s growing immigrant population from Asia and elsewhere. The communities all intermingled throughout the CID.
“This area was a central place for Asian Pacific immigrants simply because of segregation,” Cabanilla said.
Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory from 1898 to 1946, Filipino immigrants were unaffected by laws in the 1920s that restricted immigration from Japan or China. Many Filipinos came to study at the University of Washington or to work in burgeoning industries, like lumber, farming, canneries and factories.
While the physical Filipino presence in terms of buildings and storefronts in the CID dwindled in the later 20th century with redevelopment, Seattle Filipinos and Filipino Americans continued to make impacts locally, regionally and nationally.
“It may not have been in terms of storefronts, but our presence has always existed in terms of politics, culture as well,” Cabanilla said.
The Seattle Department of Transportation said it is aware that the group is working on its signage request, but the Department of Neighborhoods has not yet received a formal request. They are also working to develop a clearer process for this and other similar neighborhood signage proposals.
Filipinotown Seattle said it hopes that the sign helps remind Seattle of the CID’s unique designation as a neighborhood shaped by many immigrants and migrants to Seattle.
“Is it Chinatown? Is it Japantown? Is it Little Saigon? It’s all those things. And I think re cultivating that this is a multicultural district, Filipinotown is helping establish: Yes, it’s more than one thing,” Cabanilla said.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
The state of Washington is getting a seventh temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Marysville Washington Temple was announced Sunday night during a devotional in the Marysville Washington Stake by Elder Hugo E. Martinez, a General Authority Seventy in the church’s United States West Area Presidency.
“We are pleased to announce the construction of a temple in Marysville, Washington,” the First Presidency said in a statement. “The specific location and timing of the construction will be announced later. This is a reason for all of us to rejoice and express gratitude for such a significant blessing — one that will allow more frequent access to the ordinances, covenants and power that can only be found in the house of the Lord.”
The other temples in Washington are the Columbia River, Moses Lake, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Vancouver temples.
The church has 214 temples in operation. Plans for another 170 temples have been announced; many of those temples are in various stages of planning and construction.
Sunday’s temple announcement follows the new practice of the church’s First Presidency, which determines where temples will be built — and when and how they will be announced.
The First Presidency directed a General Authority Seventy to announce the first temple in Maine at a fireside there in December.
In January, church President Dallin H. Oaks said the Maine announcement set the pattern for future temple announcements.
“The best place to announce a temple is in that temple district,” he told the Deseret News.
The First Presidency will continue to decide where future temples will be built. It then will “assign someone else to make the announcement in the place where the temple will be built,” he said.
This pattern came to him as a strong impression after he assumed leadership of the church in October, following the death of his friend, President Russell M. Nelson.
This came as a strong impression to him shortly after he assumed the leadership of the church, President Oaks said.
The church remains in the midst of an aggressive temple-building era. President Nelson announced 200 new temples from 2018 to 2025. All but one were announced at general conference.
Five dozen temples are now under construction.
President Oaks now has overseen the announcement of two temples, neither at a general conference.
At the October conference he said that “with the large number of temples now in the very earliest phases of planning and construction, it is appropriate that we slow down the announcement of new temples.”
Ten new temples are scheduled to be dedicated in the next six months.
- May 3: Davao Philippines Temple.
- May 3: Lindon Utah Temple.
- May 31: Bacolod Philippines Temple.
- June 7: Yorba Linda California Temple.
- June 7: Willamette Valley Oregon Temple.
- Aug. 16: Belo Horizonte Brazil Temple.
- Aug. 16: Cleveland Ohio Temple.
- Aug. 30: Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple.
- Oct. 11: Miraflores Guatemala City Guatemala Temple.
- Oct. 18: Managua Nicaragua Temple.
Two-thirds of the 170 temples still to be built are outside the United States.
Temples are distinct from the meetinghouses where Latter-day Saints worship Jesus Christ each Sunday. Temples are closed on Sundays, but they open during the week as sanctuaries where church members go to find peace, make covenants with God and perform proxy ordinances for deceased relatives.
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