TWO
“The multiethnic part [of American society] does not work without another important value: belief in upward mobility. The core of that has always been the ability to level the playing field through education. Unless education is provided to all . . . that part of the dream will be lost.”
—Condoleezza Rice
SCENE: Civil War-era Alabama, on a plantation near Clinton in Greene County. Behind the main house, hundreds of acres of cotton rise from the dark clay soil that gives the region its name, the Black Belt. As darkness falls, a sense of urgency permeates the buildings. Inside the master’s house, slave house servants search for places to hide the silver and other valuables. Outside, male slaves scramble to hide stores of food. For the past week, word has spread like wildfire through the county that Union soldiers are nearby, sacking homes and stealing everything in sight. Battles over the Tennessee River Valley, just 150 miles to the north, have rumbled for months as both sides fight to claim control of the superhighway of the South. From time to time, stories of atrocities inflicted upon families and slaves by the federal troops filtered through the slave quarters and the main house. A young woman, Julia, daughter of the white plantation owner and one of his black house slaves, follows her father’s orders and rounds up the family’s horses, moving them from the barn to a hiding place that only she knows . . .
It could be the opening moments in a film version of Condi’s story, introducing great-grandmother Julia Head Rice—a child born into slavery on a Greene County plantation. Her successful feat in hiding the homestead’s horses from Union soldiers has been handed down in the Rice family lore. Condi’s second cousin, Constance “Connie” Rice, has remarked that the slaves in their family ancestry were primarily house slaves, not field slaves, which gave them more opportunity. Julia’s mother was such a slave, exposed to privilege and determined to pass along as much of it as possible to her children. She had learned how to read and write, and her desire to better herself became a hallmark of the Rice family legacy. Each generation of the line would carry a zeal for education.
After the war Julia married John Wesley Rice, a former slave from South Carolina who had also learned how to read and write. They worked as tenant farmers in Eutaw, Alabama, and although neither of them had gone to school, they instilled an appreciation for learning in their nine children and raised them as Methodists. If they practiced like the vast majority of blacks in the South at the time, they were members of one of the black Methodist churches. These congregations made up the largest black religious group in the South after the war, offering an established system of Christian worship that was already firmly established in the North. Denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, founded in 1816, formed new churches in all the Southern states, as did the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ). Southern black ministers also formed their own denomination, the Colored (later “Christian”) Methodist Episcopal Church. These churches felt a large responsibility toward helping freed slaves adjust to a new American life, and education was their major theme. Theophilus Gould Steward, an AME minister from 1864 to 1914, stressed the value of education for America’s black people in his book, Fifty Years in the Gospel Ministry:
Knowledge must be acquired; knowledge of words and things. Every fact acquired arouses new thoughts; the mind expands; the faculties are strengthened and the progress is onward to manhood. “Wisdom is strength” says Solomon; “Knowledge is power” says Bacon . . . .Barbarous peoples have been civilized, the waste country made the home of a mighty nation, the oppressed elevated, by infusing into them the power of education. England grew to its present stage of wealth and power through the diffusion of education among its population. America sprang up to its prodigious wealth and greatness by the use of the school house. And education, diffused among our people in this state and others, is the thing needed to change their condition.
One of Julia and John’s sons, John, Jr., heard the call and decided to leave the farm and go to college. In her speech at the Republican National Convention, Condi talked about him—Granddaddy Rice. “Around 1918,” she said, “he decided he was going to get book-learning. And so, he asked, in the language of the day, where a colored man could go to college. He was told about little Stillman College, a school about fifty miles away. So Granddaddy saved up his cotton for tuition and he went off to Tuscaloosa.”
Stillman was founded by a group of white Presbyterian ministers in 1874 as a school for training black ministers. It was named for the head of the founding group, Dr. Charles Allen Stillman. Twenty-five years later—well before the time John Rice arrived—the school expanded its scope to include other major courses of study as well. The Stillman Institute was not yet a degree-granting institution, and it would not become a four-year college until 1949, but it was one of the few institutions of higher learning available to blacks in Alabama.
When John’s supply of cotton ran out after his first year, he had nothing else to sell to pay for his tuition. Condi explained the turn of events that allowed him to continue his education. “My grandfather asked how those other boys were staying in school,” she said, “and he was told that they had what was called a scholarship. And they said, if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you can have one, too.” John responded as if this had been his idea all along, telling the administrators that becoming a minister was just what he had had in mind.
Condi’s grandfather finished the program and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. “My family has been Presbyterian and well educated ever since,” she said.
John, whom the family began to call “Uncle Doc,” was a minister by profession but equally committed to helping black youth get a college education. After serving his first congregation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the church sent him to oversee a Presbyterian mission in Birmingham, close to his home turf. Under Reverend Rice’s leadership, this small congregation eventually became Westminster Presbyterian Church. One of his top priorities was encouraging the congregation to help the young men and women go to college, and in many cases, to his alma mater, Stillman. He was zealous in his commitment and, when it came to seeing that the students got every opportunity to finish their programs, fearless in his approach. Stillman’s policy did not allow a student to take final exams if his tuition was not paid. Every year there were a few students from Rice’s flock who had not paid, and every year he boarded a bus to make the sixty-mile trip to the campus in Tuscaloosa. One student whom he helped, Evelyn Glover, recalled those yearly treks to the stately president’s residence on campus. “I can see him even now, walking stern and erect to the president’s door,” she said. “You did not see that back then—a black man at a white man’s front door. And they’d let him in! And whatever he said, it worked, because I never knew a student he helped who didn’t have an opportunity to make those exams, and I know our parents didn’t have the money.”
Condi’s grandfather had married by the time he began preaching in Baton Rouge, and his son, also named John Wesley Rice, was born in that city. John nurtured his son’s deep faith and instilled in him a keen drive to excel, which culminated in a seminary education, graduate degree, and several university posts. He became another powerful force in Birmingham’s black community, encouraging young people to rise above the limits that segregation and racism attempted to place on them. “He really was a person who believed that even if Birmingham was, at the time, a place of limited horizons for black children, it should still be a place of unlimited dreams,” said Condi. “It is because of people like my father . . . that Birmingham’s children were not sacrificed to the limited horizons.”
Strong parallels run between Condi’s paternal and maternal ancestry, such as a commitment to self-reliance and education. Her maternal great-grandfather was a white slave owner who bore a son and two daughters with a black house slave. Like Condi’s paternal great-great-grandmother, this woman came from an educated family and was a favored servant in the household. She had high aspirations for her children, and her two daughters (Condi’s great aunts) graduated as nurses from one of the South’s landmark institutions—Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.
Washington, who based his educational philosophy on his experiences as a student and teacher at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, began to provide vocational and teacher training for blacks at the institute in 1881. A cornerstone of the school was Washington’s mission to develop moral character and high standards of etiquette and cleanliness in his students. This “civilizing agent,” according to Washington, rounded out a total education for blacks that would help them return to their communities with both practical skills and social refinement. By combining classroom instruction with hands-on training—often through jobs that helped cover tuition—Washington strove to increase black students’ “habits of thrift, . . . love of work, ownership of property, [and] bank accounts.”
Condi’s great aunts were among the first to graduate from the Tuskegee Institute, and they became the first nurses in the Ray family. Their brother, Albert Robinson Ray III (Condi’s grandfather), was a proud and devoted father who refused to let segregation or prejudice define his self-worth or that of his children. He left home at thirteen and began working in the mines. Later, when his family began to grow, he began building homes and worked hard enough to become one of the more well-off blacks in the community. “Albert Ray,” said Condi, “worked three jobs as a mining contractor, a blacksmith and on Saturdays he built houses.” The Rays were one of the few black families in Birmingham to own a car. Albert was determined that none of his children would work in the mines as he did and, with his wife, Mattie Lula, worked hard to put all five of his children through college. “When the Great Depression came,” said Condi, “they had been so frugal that they bought their home outright with money saved in a mattress.”
Condi’s maternal grandparents shielded their children from Jim Crow statutes that materialized in greater Birmingham in everything from “colored” latrines and water fountains to city buses. One of the Ray children, Alto (Condi’s uncle), recalled that his father would ask him and his siblings to wait until they got home to go to the bathroom or get a drink rather than use one of the segregated public services. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I never got on a bus, a segregated bus, in my life.”
Alabama was particularly detailed in its Black Codes, the state and city statutes that defined segregation in the Jim Crow era. (The term Jim Crow was derived from a character in blackface minstrel shows; a character originated by a white actor named, ironically, Thomas “Daddy” Rice.) Jim Crow was not only a system of legal statutes but a way of life that encompassed an unwritten standard of behavior between blacks and whites. These standards were based on a belief that blacks were intellectually and culturally inferior to whites, a conviction that pervaded Southern society and was preached from church pulpits to university classrooms. Jim Crow included a host of social taboos: a black man could not offer his hand to shake hands with a white man; he could not offer his hand to a white woman or he risked being accused of rape; if whites and blacks ate together, the whites would be served first; black couples could not kiss or show affection for each other in public; white drivers always had the right-of-way at intersections; whites did not address blacks with the titles Mr., Mrs., or Miss, but called them by their first names—conversely, blacks had to use such courtesy names when speaking to whites; a black person always rode in the back seat of a car driven by a white person (or in the back of a truck); and so on. These were the social norms. The Black Codes translated these norms into law, and Southern cities such as Birmingham were dotted with signs in all types of public places, from restaurants to train stations, that pointed out separate facilities for blacks and whites.
By 1914, every Southern state had passed Black Codes. Those specific to Alabama included:
• Nurses: No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which Negro men are placed.
• Buses: All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for white and colored races.
• Railroads: The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.
• Restaurants: It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectively separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.
• Pool and Billiard Rooms: It shall be unlawful for a Negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.
• Toilet Facilities, Male: Every employer of white or Negro males shall provide for such white or Negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.
Condi’s grandfather and grandmother Ray insulated their children as much as possible from these aspects of society. They forbade their children, for instance, from working as hired help in white homes to supplement the family income. Cooking and cleaning for white families was routine for other black Birmingham children in the 1930s and 1940s, but not for the Rays. Condi and her cousins grew up hearing grandfather Ray’s watchwords, his guiding principle for them all: “Always remember you’re a Ray!”
Reflecting upon both sets of grandparents, Condi remarked that they had freed themselves from the society around them. “They had broken the code,” she said. “They had figured out how to make an extraordinarily comfortable and fulfilling life despite the circumstances. They did not feel that they were captives.” Addressing young Birmingham readers in an editorial in the Birmingham News, she wrote, “If you take the time to learn from these ‘ordinary people’ you will reject the most pernicious idea of our time—that somehow life is harder for you and for me than it was for our forefathers. . . . Men and women who refused to be denied have changed their circumstances time and time again throughout history and almost magically—those personal triumphs have propelled their country forward.” Condi’s second cousin, Connie Rice, added, “Our grandfathers had this indomitable outlook. It went: Racism is the way of the world, but it’s got nothing to do with your mission, which is to be the best damned whatever-you’re-going-to-be in the world. Life was a regimen: Read a book a day. Religion, religion, religion.”
One of Albert and Mattie Ray’s daughters, Angelena, was a serious piano student who went to college to obtain a degree in education. She then taught music and science at Fairfield Industrial High School in Fairfield, a predominately black, tidy southwest suburb of Birmingham set on a hill overlooking the steel mills.
While teaching at Fairfield Industrial, Angelena met a young Presbyterian minister who was also teaching at the school to supplement his minister’s salary (as most ministers did in those days). John Wesley Rice was also the head coach of the basketball team and assistant coach of the football team. When he wasn’t at the church or Fairfield High, he was working as a guidance counselor at Ullman High School in downtown Birmingham.
John was born in Baton Rouge on November 3, 1923, to John Wesley Rice and Theresa Hardnett Rice, and he and his sister, Angela Theresa, grew up attending the public schools in that city. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in his father’s alma mater, Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, but transferred to another Presbyterian-based black college Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. This historic school was founded in 1867 by two Presbyterian ministers and began as a small high school and Bible institute. By the early 1920s it had grown into a four-year liberal arts college and seminary and was renamed after one of its benefactors.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree at Smith, John spent two more years working on a master of divinity degree, which he completed in 1948 at age twenty-four. He led his first congregation in Baton Rouge before moving to Birmingham to take over his father’s ministry at Westminster Presbyterian Church in 1951. When he arrived, the church had completed its new, red brick building on South Sixth Avenue.
John’s sister, Angela Theresa Rice Love (Condi’s aunt), left Louisiana to attend the University of Wisconsin, where she received a Ph.D. in English Literature. She specialized in Victorian literature and was a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she received the Outstanding Faculty Award in 1989. Her book, a study of Dickens entitled Charles Dickens and the Seven Deadly Sins, was published by Interstate Press in 1979. One of her colleagues, Professor Betty Richardson, recalled that before coming to Illinois, Theresa spent a great deal of time building the curriculums of black schools in the South—struggling to win budgets for programs and foregoing her own academic advancement in the process. “Dr. Love was absolutely committed to African-American studies and dedicated to her students,” said Betty. “She is a woman whose total career deserves nothing but the highest respect. She was in the South creating curriculum for black schools when it was not fashionable to do so.”
When John and Angelena met, they discovered they shared a deep faith, a love for teaching, and a commitment to their own professional development. They both had aspirations for graduate school and for helping the youth of Titusville, and they both wanted to have a family. They were married in the early 1950s. Angelena has been described as a petite, light-skinned beauty who was nearly inseparable from her sister, Mattie (named after her mother). Friends called them the twins because they dressed alike and did everything together. “Angelena was very beautiful, very elegant,” said her sister-in-law, Connie Ray, and Condi has said that her mother always dressed beautifully.
John and Angelena’s marriage brought together two family lineages that believed strongly in religion and achievement through education. Condi, described by one political journal as “the very picture of American over-achievement,” recognizes that she is the product of a family legacy that has always made education a priority. With three generations of college-educated family members, including preachers, teachers, and lawyers, the bar has always been set high. “So I should have turned out the way I did,” she told the Financial Times.
“I don’t know too many American families, period, who can claim that not only are their parents college-educated, but their grandparents are college-educated and all their cousins and aunts and uncles are college-educated,” said Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor and friend of Condi. Upon hearing that Condi grew up in Birmingham, many assume that her childhood was deprived and underprivileged and that she did not see the light of opportunity until the Civil Rights movement began to bear fruit. But that is not Condi’s story. As she has often repeated, it is not a matter of America’s civil rights struggle but of her own family legacy.
With the birth of Condi, John and Angelena funneled all the family support, strength, pride, faith in God, and sense of responsibility that had shaped their lives into their child. “They wanted the world,” said Connie Rice. “They wanted Rice to be free of any kind of shackles, mentally or physically, and they wanted her to own the world. And to give a child that kind of entitlement, you have to love her to death and make her believe that she can fly.”