Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (7 page)

Condi learned to love football like other little girls love horses or books. “My dad was a football coach when I was born,” she said, “and I was supposed to be his all-American linebacker. He wanted a boy in the worst way. So when he had a girl, he decided he had to teach me everything about football.” Starting at age four, Condi cuddled up with her father on Sunday afternoons to watch games on TV while he gave detailed commentary on the rules, the plays, the strategies, and the conferences. And being a girl did not sideline her from the sport—every year on the day after Thanksgiving they stopped talking and played their own “Rice Bowl” in the backyard. She loved the turf battles, the drama—and the guys. “When I grow up I’m going to marry a professional football player!” she said to the mother of one of her grade-school friends.

John also spent quality time with Condi going over current events and talking about how they fit into history. “It was music with my mother, and sports and history with my father,” Condi said. When she was still a preschooler, she would often call her neighbor Juliemma Smith to talk about the latest stories in the newspaper. “Condi was always interested in politics because as a little girl she used to call me and say things like, ‘Did you see what Bull Connor did today?’ She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn’t know what she was going to talk about.” (Eugene “Bull” Connor was Birmingham’s brutally racist city commissioner.)

Both John and Angelena had summers off from teaching, and most years they packed up their Dodge for long road trips. These outings usually involved stopping along the way to visit a college campus or two. The Rices couldn’t resist strolling through a famous university or college—a wondrous, tree-lined shrine of American opportunity. “We almost always stopped on college campuses,” said Condi. “Other kids visited Yellowstone National Park. I visited college campuses. I remember us driving 100 miles out of the way to visit Ohio State in Columbus.”

During several summers, both John and Angelena took graduate courses at the University of Denver, and John earned his master’s degree in education there in 1969. Angelena took classes on and off for twenty years, from 1961 to 1982, and received her master of arts in education in 1982. When she and John were in class all day during those Denver summers, they wanted Condi to be doing something productive and supervised. The solution was the skating rink. “Figure skating was high-priced child care,” Condi said, but she loved it. She spent several hours each day developing her skills, focusing on one thing that, like piano, brought gratifying results. Years of ballet gave her the grace, refinement, and strength of a good skater, and she also enjoyed the structure of training. Later, she would intensify her commitment and enter competitive programs. Even though she never reached the level she had hoped to achieve, skating had positive side effects that stayed with Condi for the rest of her life.

Summers in Denver were an ideal escape from the Alabama heat—and from the violence that had turned Condi’s hometown into “Bombingham.” As blacks gradually began to move into white neighborhoods, the Ku Klux Klan retaliated by bombing their homes. One of the Rices’ friends, attorney Arthur Shores, was among those black families who relocated to a predominantly white area and paid the price. On August 21 and September 4, 1963, vigilantes bombed and nearly destroyed his home as they had others in the neighborhood by then known as Dynamite Hill. Condi and her parents brought food and clothes over to the Shores after their house was bombed.

The Birmingham bombings were also motivated by federal court orders to integrate Birmingham’s schools, orders that Governor George Wallace himself vowed to fight in his famous campaign slogan to “stand in the schoolhouse door.” From the capitol in Montgomery the governor urged citizens to resist desegregation, and his speeches fueled the violence. Like all the children in her church and her neighborhood, Condi was frightened by stories about the explosions and remembers 1963 as “the year of all the bombings.” She said that “Arthur Shores was a friend, [and] here was a period when the movement turned violent.” Shores had been the target of this kind of violence for decades as a defender of black rights in Birmingham. For many years he was the only black attorney in Alabama, and his cases often involved the city’s unconstitutional zoning codes. Back in 1949, his efforts on behalf of a black family who wanted to move into a traditionally white neighborhood resulted in bombs being placed in his office and his home. He found them before they were ignited, but when he brought them to the police and the FBI, neither organization helped him. The bombings of his home in 1963 were more of the same.

Shores and others knew that going to the police didn’t help because the police department itself played a role in the bombings. “The police would show up and tell everybody to get off the streets,” said Birmingham historian Pam King. “They’d clear the streets and the Klan would come through and throw the bombs. They weren’t looking out for the safety of the citizens, they were just trying to clear the way for the Klu Klux Klan to come through and bomb.” When a firebomb landed in the Rices’ neighborhood—a dud that didn’t go off—John Rice took it to the police and requested an investigation, but they would not conduct an inquiry.

With the bombings that summer came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called “nightriders” who drove through black neighborhoods shooting and setting fires. Condi’s father and other neighborhood men guarded their streets at night to keep the nightriders away from their homes. Armed with shotguns, they formed night-long patrols. The memory of her father out on patrol forms Condi’s opposition to gun control today. Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defense. “I have a sort of pure Second Amendment view of the right to bear arms,” Condi said in 2001.

For black people in Birmingham, especially the children, 1963 was a terrifying year. “Those terrible events burned into my consciousness,” said Condi. “I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats. Some solace to me was the piano and what a world of joy it brought me.” She added that blacks from all walks of life came together to help each other, which strengthened the cause. “The bonding together of the black community was inspiring,” she said. “We all helped each other. Class differences in the black community had no meaning. We were all bonded together.” In the city-within-a-city that was black Birmingham, class differences ran deep. Middle-class black families set up rigid social boundaries to ensure they would not lose the place they had worked so hard to achieve. “It’s too hard to get there and the fall back is too long,” said historian Pam King. “It’s too precious, too hard to get in, and too easy to fall out.” Many sent their daughters to college before their sons, knowing that black women stood a better chance of making it because they did not present as much of a threat to white society. They also left some of the black neighborhoods of Birmingham for the suburbs, just as whites have done all over the nation, taking their money and resources with them. “When integration occurred, places like the Fourth Avenue District [Birmingham’s all-black business and entertainment district] and black neighborhoods collapsed because the blacks moved out, moved to other places,” said Pam King. “We don’t talk about black flight much, but it’s the same phenomenon; blacks have moved out to the suburbs just like the white middle class.”

Several weeks before “the year of all the bombings,” Condi worried about a different type of bomb threat. In October 1962, the newspapers and evening news reported the day-by-day developments in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Condi was seven years old and she discussed the story with her parents. Somehow, the news reports that came into her living room—with maps showing the projected routes of the missiles—felt like a closer threat than the bombings going on in her own city. Her father could protect her from greater Birmingham, but could he protect her from Fidel Castro and his nuclear warheads? “We all lived within range,” she said. “The Southeast was it—you’d see these red arrows coming at Birmingham. And I remember thinking that was something that maybe my father couldn’t handle.”

The Rices were also friends of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, an icon of the movement in Birmingham with whom Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., teamed up when he became active there. When Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the state, Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. One of the operations organized by Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders involved children’s marches, which would bring renewed attention to the movement and also enlarge ranks that were becoming sorely depleted with the arrests of many black adult demonstrators. These protests were part of an ongoing plan called Project C, for “confrontation,” that sought to tackle segregation through sit-ins, boycotts of white retail stores, mass marches, and Freedom Rides—the co-racial bus movement that rolled through Alabama and other Southern states.

A handful of students from Miles College—where Condi’s mother received her degree—carried out peaceful “sit-in” protests at segregated lunch counters in Birmingham in 1960. Their attempts were not immediately successful, however. “The white power structure put pressure on the president of Miles College to get these kids to stop,” explained Jack Davis, an assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. “And any time there was any sort of demonstration, Bull Connor clamped down and did everything he could to frustrate protests and maintain segregation. He was very much opposed to any talk of the retail stores downtown lifting their segregation policies.”

Jack, who is white, remembered his father’s conversations about the reactions of the business community in Birmingham during the Project C protests of the 1960s. “My father worked downtown in the heart of everything, and he remembered a lot of the pickets, rallies, and marches. He remembered how whites were so horrified by these demonstrations and how many of them were determined to maintain the status quo. But there were also those who realized that change was inevitable.”

Thousands of school children participated in peaceful marches in May 1963, taking days off from school to protest the city’s segregation laws. They did not foresee how dangerous their actions would become.

The city’s power boss, Bull Connor, controlled both the police and fire departments and tried to put down the demonstrations. As a city commissioner, he did everything in his power to inflame racist sentiment among the white working class—and to keep segregation alive in Birmingham. He wrote some of the state legislation that tried to halt the Civil Rights movement in Alabama, for example, such as a bill outlawing the Freedom Rides. In his words, the Freedom Riders were agitators who were “challenging our way of life.”

The marches showed no sign of waning in May 1963, and Bull Connor commanded the police to use force to scatter the protesters. The dogs and fire hoses that had previously been pulled out as threat tactics were turned on the crowds. Powerful jets of water sent children rolling down the street and several people were bitten by the department’s German shepherds. An article in the
Montgomery Advertiser
from early May described one scene from the first of May in a headline article entitled, “Dogs, Water Used to Halt Negro March”:

With firemen brandishing their hoses, a policeman with a loudspeaker warned the marchers, “Disperse or you’ll get wet.” The teen-agers, most of them 13 to 16, kept moving.

Then the water hit them. Cowering, first with hands over their heads, then on their knees or clinging together with their arms around each other, they tried to hold their ground.

A woman, Vivian Lowe, was bleeding from the nose. She said she was injured by a stream of water from the fire hoses. An unidentified girl suffered cuts about her eyes when struck by the stream of water. . . . another Negro, Henry Lee Shambry, 34, said he was bitten by two police dogs. One of his trouser legs was ripped nearly off and his underclothing was bloodstained.

Although John and Angelena Rice supported the goals of the Civil Rights movement, they did not agree with all of the tactics used in Birmingham. Boycotting a department store was one thing, but putting children in harm’s way did not appeal to either of them. John did not condone the schoolchildren’s marches because he believed that threatening children’s safety was a step in the wrong direction. The students’ marches were making news around the country and John’s students wanted to know where he stood. He urged them to stay in school and fight with their minds.

“My father was not a march-in-the-street preacher,” Condi said. “He saw no reason to put children at risk. He would never put his own child at risk.” But as throng after throng of children and teenagers marched through the streets, John knew that the force of history was upon them and he wanted to give eight-year-old Condi a glimpse of what was happening. When the Rices’ across-the-street neighbor children were arrested for marching in May 1963, John brought Condi to the state fairgrounds west of the city where the youth were being held, huddled beneath tents. In addition to his neighbors, many of the arrested kids were his students and he wanted to check on their safety. He strode through the hot crowd with Condi riding on his shoulders. Earlier in the day, they had watched demonstrations in the downtown business district from a safe distance a few blocks away.

Bull Connor’s use of dogs and fire hoses against children was covered on national television that summer, bringing the escalating problems of Birmingham into sharp focus for millions of Americans. In May 1963, President Kennedy announced that it was time for the U.S. Congress “to act, to make a commitment it has not made in the century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” That month, his administration began drafting the Civil Rights Act.