The Education of Kevin Powell

The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood is a 2015 autobiography by poet, journalist, and activist Kevin Powell. From a hardscrabble childhood in New Jersey, Powell became the first member of his family to go to university, where he was a leading student activist. During his career as a journalist, he profiled several prominent figures, notably Tupac Shakur, and became a household name as a cast member on the first season of MTV’s The Real World. However, his success was undermined by the demons of his childhood and his experience of racism. Battles with alcoholism and depression cost him several relationships and the best part of his career. The Education of Kevin Powell charts this journey and Powell’s search for redemption.

Part I of Powell’s book, “Trapped in a concrete box,” describes the author’s childhood in a series of New Jersey ghettos. The central figure is Powell’s mother. She loves her son fiercely and dreams that he will grow up to be “somebody important,” but she fears that he will end up “just like his no-good father.” To make sure that doesn’t happen, she beats Powell ferociously.

He also encounters his fair share of beatings on the street. Violence is a daily reality for Powell at a young age. When he was three years old, he recalls, he overheard his mother talking about taking him to a “photo shoot.” He thought he was going to be shot. He already knew about gun violence and expected it to happen to him. As a teenager, he is beaten so badly, he believes he is going to die: “My mother would come to the hospital to identify me and scream—the kind of cry every ghetto mother saves for the day when it is her son who has died prematurely. I could hear my mother’s anguished voice: ‘Lawd, I knew he would end up this way. He was always walkin’ the wrong path.’”



Despite flirting with petty crime, Powell excels at school. Nevertheless, he walks a knife-edge. Looking back, the adult Powell understands that he saw himself through other people’s racist and limiting stereotypes about what a young black boy from a poor, fatherless family should be like. His anger and pain frequently erupt in violence and other “destructive behavior.” He is eventually expelled from high school.

Nevertheless, he earns tuition-free acceptance to Rutgers University, the first member of his family to attend university. From black student activists, Powell learns to see his personal suffering from a political perspective, and he becomes a leading student activist with an increasingly broad sense of the injustice in American society. One day, in a fit of rage, he pulls a knife on another student. The university suspends him.

Instead of returning to Rutgers, Powell moves to New York, hoping to make a living from his experiments in writing. Part II, “Living on the other side of midnight,” follows the rise and fall of Powell’s career.



Powell discusses briefly his appearance on MTV’s The Real World. His experience on the show is marred by racism, and his angry outbursts make him a controversial figure.

Early successes in journalism lead to a job for Vibe magazine, writing about hip-hop music and culture. In this role, he produces profiles of important figures, including General Colin Powell. He controversially interviews hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur while the rapper is awaiting trial in Rikers Island jail.

However, Powell has a tense relationship with the two editors he serves under at Vibe. Both are white, and Powell feels that a magazine about hip-hop culture should be under black leadership. He repeatedly loses his temper over the issue, and eventually, he is fired from the magazine.



With his career on the skids, Powell slides into alcoholism and depression. A series of relationships fail, each more seriously than the last. Powell admits to physically attacking one girlfriend, and he rigorously analyses his own misogyny, finding its roots in his upbringing and in the misogyny of hip-hop culture. Powell finds himself haunted by his mother’s fear that he will become “just like his no-good father.”

Powell returns to politics, making two runs for Congress, both of which are extremely unsuccessful. Retreating from the fray, Powell travels to Nigeria, where he begins to experience some personal healing. The book ends as Powell tracks down his father’s family. Powell’s narrative ends on a positive note, but he stresses that his story isn’t over: he has a lot of healing still to do.

The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood explores themes of racism, misogyny, violence, and the role of hip-hop culture in African-American life. The book was hailed as a “powerful and unsparing…witness not only to the life of one black man, but to an American society still bound to a tragic history of racism” (Kirkus Reviews).