He was the lone child of a mother who had moved to Jersey City, N.J. from South Carolina’s Low Country.
Powell said his father abandoned him and his mom when he was small and that rebuff not only left him with troubling questions but made him the recipient of even more off-base and bruising answers.
He had a complicated relationship with his mother.
There was love and there was an appreciation of learning — although she had just an eighth-grade education, she instilled in him an appreciation of books and reading — but there also was staggering poverty, neglect and abuse.
Too often he paid for the sins of the father. His mom looked at him and too often saw the man who had deserted her.
“As someone who grew up without any father, it’s a question I’ve been asking myself since I was a young kid,” Powell said when we spoke the other afternoon. “I’ve wondered. ‘What should I be? How do I become it?’”
Credit: Evangeline Lawson
Credit: Evangeline Lawson
Over the years he’s addressed the issue of his father and fatherhood and who a man truly is.
In his poem, “My Father,” he paints an unvarnished picture of his life without a dad and forgives him for the many hurts that came from his abandonment.
His “Letter From a Father to a Child” — was printed in the New York Times three days before Father’s Day in 2020. It’s a message to his future child about surviving in the climate of fear, violence, racism and sexism that so often permeates today’s world.
The letter is an excerpt from his novel “When We Free the World,” which is also the title of the new feature length documentary film he cowrote and directed with his wife, the noted photographer Evangeline Lawson, that he will show at Sinclair Community College on June 18th.
Credit: Evangeline Lawson
Credit: Evangeline Lawson
Powell will be in Dayton for two big events around the Juneteenth holiday.
Wednesday’s event (June 18) at Sinclair is free and open to the public. It’s part of the college’s annual Juneteenth celebration.
Powell said his film: “Is about manhood and what it means to be a man.
“We have every different male — over 70 in all — from five different generations. There are men of different identities, classes and backgrounds. They’re from all over the country: Black men, white men, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous.
“There are teenagers who only know the world through social media and there are 90-something year old men going back to the Korean and Vietnam wars. All are discussing the very serious question: ‘What does it mean to be a man?’”
The film was six years in the making and he and his wife now have shown it in places like California, New York, New Jersey, Oregon and New Hampshire.
‘Someone you need to hear’
Sixteen years ago — in 2009 — Powell was the featured speaker at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Prayer Breakfast at the University of Dayton. He also spoke at the same event at UD in January.
After he finished the 2009 event, he has a poignant memory, sitting with UD students to watch the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
Three years later he also spoke on MLK Day events at the Dayton Convention Center.
Powell knows Ohio and Ohioans quite well.
He profiled Dave Chappelle, the universally acclaimed and locally treasured comedian who lives outside of Yellow Springs.
Powell has spoken at a few Ohio colleges in the past and he curated the first exhibit of hip-hop in America at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
During our conversation the other day, he referred to several things tied to the Miami Valley.
He noted how Dayton’s Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of his favorite poets.
He mentioned the Underground Railroad sites in the area and spoke compassionately about the Haitian community in Springfield and the way they’ve been unjustly targeted with untruths and hate.
“Kevin Powell is just an amazing guy with a great documentary and a down-to-earth way to talk about so many things in our world today,” said Michael Carter, the senior advisor to the president at Sinclair and the namesake of the Michael and Debbie Carter Center for American History which features the “Our American Journey” exhibit.
“He’s someone you need to hear,” Carter said.
UD President Eric Spina echoed those thoughts in an Instagram post:
“So pleased to welcome the extraordinary Kevin Powell back to (UD) to give the keynote speech at our annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Breakfast Celebration. Preaching hope, kindness, and love, Kevin provides a message that we will all carry forward.”
‘I forgive you’
Powell’s mother, Shirley Powell, was a proud Gullah Geechee woman from South Carolina who left a one-room shotgun shack for a New Jersey tenement with an eighth-grade education and a fierce drive to survive.
Although she could be an intense and physical disciplinarian, she also stressed values and backbone and education with her son. She promoted reading and books and school.
Powell and his cousin were the first in the family to graduate from high school. He was the first to go to college, enrolling at Rutgers University in 1984 through the Educational Opportunity Fund program created during the Civil Rights movement to benefit youth who otherwise lacked access to higher education.
At Rutgers, Powell was exposed to a bigger world than he had known, and he eventually found his voice.
He was introduced to the Harlem Renaissance writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes; and the poets of the Black Arts Movement like Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka. He read books like “The Autobiography of Malcom X .”
Although he blossomed, he also had his own early struggles with anger and alcohol and violence, problems rooted in his upbringing.
His book, “The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey Into Manhood” is a compelling chronicle of his life and is being adapted for the screen.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
His eventual transformation came thanks to many things, everything from yoga and veganism to the support and enlightenment that came from his wife: “From the moment I met her, she stressed love and kindness need to be practiced and now that’s how I roll,” he said.
The complete turnaround can be summed up in something he’s spoken about in the past and has emphasized in his poetry.
He talks of an appreciation of self, eclipsing his old self-hatred.
He ends his “My Father” poem with:
I forgive you
Because
I also forgive me
For all those many years
I hated myself
For having
No father
He’s filled the space — once given to inner hate and outer turmoil — with a compassion and love for his fellow man.
“I don’t like to see anyone suffering,” he said. “I don’t want to see anyone because of their background, the color of their skin or their identity hurting.”
‘These divided times’
Two of Powell’s heroes are the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, who were assassinated some two months apart in 1968.
He speaks of them and their lessons often.
He told how some years back he had been in an Oakland, California museum to see an exhibit on the turbulent year of 1968 and how it had included a film on the Last Train Ride of Bobby Kennedy.
On June 5 , 1968 Kennedy, a U.S. senator and candidate in the Democratic primaries, was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after addressing campaign workers.
He died a day later and on June 8, after a funeral mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, his body was taken to Penn Station for the 225-mile train trip to Washington. D.C. and his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
The usual four-hour trip took eight hours because thousands of mourners had lined the tracks along the entire route to pay their respects and touchingly bid a hero goodbye
“All around me, people of all backgrounds from multiple generations watched quietly,” Powell said. “We all were crying as we watched the footage.
“Can you imagine people coming out today — like they did (in 1968) — in these divided times?”
Powell has spoken across the country — in all 50 states and in five other nations — and has had in-person conversations with people on the far left and the far right and everywhere in between.
He was twice an unsuccessful candidate for a Democratic U.S. House seat in New York and said he’s had people come up to him and say, “I hate the Democratic Party — Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, the Kennedys but I heard what you are saying and I see it.”
The 59-year-old Powell said for all our differences in America, he’s found we have so many things in common and he believes face-to-face, one-on-one conversations can bring that out amongst differing people.
“This hatred, this venom toward anyone who is not like you, the stuff we’re seeing and hearing now: No! No! No! and No!
“It’s not acceptable. It’s not who we are.
“We are better than that as a people and as a nation.
“The way the Haitians have been targeted in Springfield is unacceptable. People are questioning many of these ICE raids they see around the country now. It’s inhumane to do that to families, to children. It’s unjust and it’s evil.
“I ask people when we speak, ‘Is that OK with you?’
“Where is your head at America? Where is your soul?
“You can’t just hide in your box or your silo and not bother to find out about someone else. We have to have the courage to have honest conversations about who we are as a country and how did we get here.
“I think once we have those conversations, we start to heal as a society.
“We get a deeper understanding of each other, a deeper understanding of America and how we all want the same things for our families. We all just want to feel like we belong, no matter who we are or where we are from. No one should be discarded or devalued.
“That’s what I try to do, and I think that follows the traditions of Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King and the many men and women (of conscience) who came before us.
“And that’s what my work is about now. I just want to keep creating my art in all its forms so it will foster those kinds of conversations for everyone.”
He’s now doing it for others just like he once did it for himself.
That’s why he could end his “My Father” poem as he did:
I forgive you
Because
I also forgive me
For all those many years
I hated myself
For having
No father
The film “When We Free the World” will be shown Wednesday, June 18 in Sinclair’s Conference Center in Building 12. It begins at 6 p.m. Afterward, creator Kevin Powell and his wife Evangeline Lawson will hold a question-and-answer session with the audience.
Those hoping to attend should preregister on Sinclair’s website.
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