Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (8 page)

A tragic event in the fall of 1963 brought Birmingham’s battles to a new, horrifying level. On September 15, a Sunday morning, the sanctuary of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was full of worshipers, including many of Birmingham’s prominent black families. Downstairs, the Sunday school classrooms along the east wall were bustling with children beginning their lessons. In one room the children included four girls: Denise McNair, eleven, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins, all fourteen. At 10:24 A.M., a dynamite bomb hit the building and blew a hole in the wall of their room. All four girls were killed, buried beneath the rubble, and dozens of other children and adults were injured.

The blast was felt throughout the city, including at Westminster Presbyterian two miles away, where the floor fluttered beneath Condi’s feet. “I remember a sensation of something shaking, but just very slight,” she said. “And later people learned who had been killed in the church.” Denise McNair, the youngest girl killed in the blast, was one of Condi’s friends. They had attended kindergarten together.

The Rices attended the funeral, and one image from that day left a lasting impression in Condi’s mind. “I remember more than anything the coffins,” she said. “The small coffins. And the sense that Birmingham wasn’t a very safe place.” Two months shy of her ninth birthday, Condi realized that hatred and bloodshed lie just outside the haven her parents and community had so carefully constructed. It was a brutal awakening.

Justice was slow in the four murders that made up the deadliest act of the Civil Rights movement. In May 2002, the last conviction was finally made. Bobby Cherry, age seventy-one, was convicted of murder by a jury of nine whites and three blacks. Before him, Thomas Blanton had been convicted in 2001, and Robert Chambliss in 1977. The fourth Klansman involved in the murders, Herman Cash, died before being charged.

For all of his efforts to protect his daughter and other children in Birmingham from the ugliness of segregation, John Rice could not always evade its effects himself. He and Angelena could not, for example, take graduate classes at the University of Alabama, just blocks away from Titusville, because it did not accept black students. And voting for the pro-civil rights Democrats was impossible, as the Dixiecrats ruled the party with an iron fist in Alabama and were determined to “keep blacks in their place.” (The Dixiecrats were formed in 1948 when a group of Democrats, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, split off from the Democratic Party to oppose Truman’s racial integration policies.) The Dixiecrats called the shots in Birmingham government, including the Democratic Party’s voting process.

Blacks had won the right to vote with the passing of the fifteenth amendment in 1869, but the Southern states had developed several ways to circumvent the law. In the 1950s, Alabama was still enforcing various incarnations of the poll tax, a fee for voting that excluded many black people from the process. Other constraints were firmly in place when John Rice went to the polls in 1952. In a
Boston Globe
article, journalist Wil Haygood describes the scene that day:

In 1952, John Rice himself went to vote in Birmingham. Stood there with his ministerial credentials and all his college learning. A man pointed to a jar. The jar was full of beans. The man told Reverend John Rice that if he could guess the number of beans in the jar, he could vote.

John had learned from a few Republicans in his congregation that the GOP did not use such tactics. He signed up for the Republican Party that day and never looked back. At the Republican National Convention, Condi shared this story about her father. “The first Republican that I knew was my father, John Rice, and he is still the Republican I admire most,” she said. “My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. I want you to know that my father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.”

When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the Rices watched the historic event on television. A couple of days later they went to a historically all-white restaurant in Birmingham for the first time. “The people there stopped eating for a couple of minutes,” said Condi, but then the novelty wore off and everyone went about their business. The changes weren’t so smooth everywhere, however. “A few weeks later we went through a drive-in,” she said, “and when we drove away I bit into my hamburger—and it was all onions.” Signing slain President Kennedy’s bill into law made President Johnson “a revered figure” in the Rice household. Condi believes that an important part of the civil rights story also lies in the people who were ready to put the new laws into practice in their lives, the blacks who had prepared themselves through education. “The legal changes made a tremendous difference,” she said, “but not in the absence of people who were already prepared to take advantage of them, and therefore took full advantage of them. You can’t write them out of the story.”

Condi is aware that her parents’ approach to segregation—how they dealt with it and how they discussed it with her—and their uncompromising attitude about education made an enormous impact on her life. “I am so grateful to my parents for helping me through that period,” she said of her childhood in Birmingham. “They explained to me carefully what was going on, and they did so without any bitterness. It was in the very air we breathed that education was the way out. . . . Among all my friends, the kids I grew up with, there was . . . no doubt in our minds that we would grow up and go to colleges—integrated colleges—just like other Americans.”

In 1965, Condi’s father took a job that launched him into a new phase of his career. As dean of students at Stillman College, he became part of the leadership of an institution that figured prominently in the Rice family legacy. This is where Condi’s “Grandaddy Rice” came to get an education, lift himself out of the sharecroppers’ fields, and rechart the family’s journey in the church by training as a Presbyterian minister.

By the time John arrived as the new dean, Stillman had come a long way since its beginnings as “an institute for the training of Negro pastors” in 1876. In 1930, it added a women’s nursing training school, and in 1953, became an accredited four-year college by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Just four years before John arrived, the college had become a member of the United Negro College Fund, making it eligible for funds from the forty-college cooperative.

With this new job, the Rices moved to Tuscaloosa, less than sixty miles from Birmingham. They were still close enough to keep in close touch with relatives and friends, as the trip was a quick drive on newly completed Interstate 20. The position advanced John in his profession, moving him out of the world of secondary education. From that point on, he would continue to work with young people as part of his church and volunteer activities, but his academic work would involve young, college-age adults. His number-one pupil, his “Little Star,” was growing up, too.

FOUR

Chopin, Shakespeare, or Soviets?

“I don’t ever remember thinking I was an exceptional student. I did think I was a good pianist.”

—Condoleezza Rice

AFTER
working at Stillman College for three years, John Rice received a new job offer that involved a much bigger move for the family. This time the change of locale would have a greater impact on Condi’s life than the family’s initial move out of Birmingham, for not only did they leave their family and friends in Alabama, they left the South entirely. John’s new job came about after he completed his summer graduate courses at the University of Denver and received a master of arts in education on June 10, 1969. That year the university offered him a position as assistant director of admissions, and he soon began teaching as well.

From the start, John Rice worked in the academic as well as the administrative halls of the university. He began to coordinate and teach a class entitled “Black Experience in America,” and over the years expanded the scope of the course to include notable figures who held sessions with students and gave formal presentations that were open to the public. The class discussed the black vote, the role of blacks in politics, and various cultural topics, and John invited national-level speakers to speak, including Howard Robinson, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Reverend Channing Phillips, the first black person to be nominated for the presidency of the United States. One seminar focused on blacks in popular culture and featured Gordon Parks, director and producer of
Shaft
and
Shaft’s Big Score
, who led a discussion on “The Black Man in the Movies.”

Condi recalled another speaker invited to the class, Fannie Lou Hamer, an icon of the Civil Rights movement known as the woman who was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Fannie Lou first learned that she had the right to vote when she was forty-four years old. Volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were visiting her Mississippi town and encouraging blacks to register for the vote. Fannie Lou and a few others volunteered to go to the courthouse and register, but when they arrived, they were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten. Even though she continued to receive death threats after she returned home, Fannie Lou committed herself to the SNCC and traveled throughout the country speaking about the cause and helping people register. She eventually cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and alerted millions of Americans to the South’s voting abuses via televised coverage of the Democratic National Convention in 1964.

“I will never forget meeting . . . Fannie Lou Hamer when I was a teenager,” she said in her speech to the Stanford graduating class of 2002. “She was not sophisticated in the way we think of it, yet so compelling that I remember the power of her message even today. In 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer refused to listen to those who told her that a sharecropper with a sixth-grade education could not, or should not, launch a challenge that would dismantle the racist infrastructure of Mississippi’s Democratic party. She did it anyway.”

In 1974, after five years of teaching, John Rice’s position was upgraded from instructor to adjunct history professor. Although this title still did not carry the perks of an assistant professorship, such as insurance benefits, a higher pay scale, or the opportunity to move toward a tenure-track position, it did not impede John’s ability to do well for his family. He was covered by a benefits package through his administrative positions and, for him, the bonus of the teaching job was his ability to make an impact on the black studies program at the university. For the first time, he taught at the college level about issues that he had encountered first hand, from the segregation laws of the Jim Crow South to the demonstrations in Birmingham to the impact of education on forming black leaders. The day-to-day, frontline work he had done as a minister, counselor, and teacher in Birmingham became the material for teaching a new generation about what it meant to grow up black in the South.

John Rice held a variety of administrative positions at the university during the thirteen years he worked there. In addition to his job as assistant director of admissions, he became the assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 1969 and was promoted to associate dean in 1973. He served a brief stint as assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and in 1974 became vice chancellor of university resources.

As associate dean, John Rice helped turn the university into a black intellectual center. “DU is more aware of minority problems and is seemingly striving to do more about them than ever before,” he said in 1972. “I feel we really have the ball rolling . . . toward making this school one of the few ones with real sense of the pluralism in American life.” He announced a new dedication to finding additional black instructors and encouraging more black student participation in campus organizations. “I feel there is a total awareness of black culture on campus now,” he continued, “and I hope to create a deeper understanding of it throughout the coming year.”

Even more than the job security or the teaching opportunities, John and Angelena felt that the most attractive aspect of the university was its location. The move to Denver was a fundamentally positive change for their daughter.

For a black high school student like Condi in 1969, the 1,300-mile stretch between Tuscaloosa and Denver was nothing compared to the qualitative distance between them. Even the dramatic contrast in climate, from the wet and humid tropics of Alabama to the airy heights of Denver that receive an average of sixty inches of snow each year, was a milder shift than the change of overall sensibility between Tuscaloosa and Englewood, the cozy Denver suburb where Condi began high school. Englewood bordered South Denver, the neighborhood in which the Rices bought their house when they moved to the city. Condi enrolled in St. Mary’s Academy, a private Catholic school and vastly different than any school she had attended in Alabama. At thirteen, she was in an integrated school for the first time.