THREE
“My parents had me absolutely convinced that . . . you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth’s but you can be president of the United States.”
—Condoleezza Rice
CONDI was born on a Sunday morning while her father was leading the eleven o’clock service at Westminster, a fitting time for a child of deeply religious parents to enter the world. The congregation often glanced over at the empty organ bench that morning, wondering how Angelena was doing and offering silent prayers that all would go well. They knew that Reverend Rice wanted a son—a football-, baseball-, and basketball-playing boy with whom he could share all the joys of sports. But if it was a girl, that would be wonderful, too—whatever the Lord delivered. On November 14, 1954, Angelena gave birth to a girl, and she named her Condoleezza. John simply named her his “Little Star,” and he continued to call her that for the rest of his life.
John Rice preached at Westminster Presbyterian for eleven years, making the church Condi’s second home. When she was born, the Rices still lived in the pastor’s quarters, a set of rooms in the church building. Later, the church built a parsonage about eight blocks south at 929 Center Way, and the Rices moved in. The small, brick house sat on the corner of a brand-new, tidy block in a newly developed section of Titusville, one of Birmingham’s black middle-class neighborhoods. The area would continue to grow, encroaching into the lush forest with block after block of attractive, well-landscaped homes. Because Condi’s house was so close to the church, she spent most of her time in this small, protected enclave of friends and family.
This close-knit community of Birmingham’s black teachers, preachers, and other middle-class citizens was a parallel world in which the Rices sheltered Condi from the harsh realities of segregated Birmingham. All the parents in their neighborhood dedicated themselves to nurturing strong, self-confident children. “They simply ignored, ignored the larger culture that said you’re second class, you’re black, you don’t count, you have no power,” said Connie Rice, Condi’s second cousin. But that was just one element of the type of parenting that Condi received. John and Angelena showered their daughter with love, attention, praise, and exposure to all the elements of Western culture—music, ballet, foreign language, athletics, and the great books. “I had parents who gave me every conceivable opportunity,” she said. “They also believed in achievement.” When Condi was born, Angelena devoted herself to her intellectual and artistic development. With piano lessons and a full schedule of training in other subjects, Condi gained self-discipline long before she started attending school. “It was a very controlled environment with little kids’ clubs and ballet lessons and youth group and church every Sunday,” Condi said. “The discipline comes from that.”
Music had always been at the center of Angelena’s life, and she was determined to give her daughter every opportunity to become a professional musician. From the first days of her life, Condi was immersed in church and classical music, listening to the piano, the organ, and the choir. Her relatives recall that she was an early reader, but Condi has remarked that she learned how to read music before learning to read books.
Condi was the fourth pianist in her mother’s line. “My mother played, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all played piano,” she said. When Angelena went back to work, Condi spent each weekday at her grandmother Mattie Ray’s house. Hour after hour the piano students marched in, and Condi was fascinated with the sounds they made and all the attention her grandmother gave them. Little Condi would walk up to the piano and bang on the keys, trying to copy her grandmother’s playing. Mattie felt that there was more to Condi’s interest than simple curiosity, and she wanted to explore it. “So she said to my mother, let’s teach her to play,” Condi said. “I was only about three. My mother thought I might be a little young, but my grandmother wanted to try it and as a result I learned to play very, very young.”
Angelena could not have been happier. She had always planned to immerse her daughter in music, like her own mother and grandmother had done with her, and was thrilled to discover that Condi was already attracted to the piano on her own. “Condi’s always been so focused, ever since she was really, really young,” said her mother’s sister, Genoa Ray McPhatter, who was a school principal in Chesapeake, Virginia. “She would practice her piano at a certain time without anyone having to remind her.” Angelena set Condi upon the fast track immediately, not only with piano lessons but also by accelerating her education.
Because Condi could read fluently by age five, Angelena wanted to start her in school that year. The principal of the local black elementary school said that she was too young, however, so Angelena took a leave of absence from Fairfield High for one year and stayed home to homeschool Condi—it just didn’t make sense that her perfectly capable child should be forced to waste a year of learning. Down the road, Condi was so advanced that she skipped the first and seventh grades.
Condi’s year of homeschooling was regimented and intense. Juliemma Smith, a long-time family friend, said that Angelena organized Condi’s day as if she were in a regular classroom, but her lessons were more rigorous. “They didn’t play,” she said. “They had classes, then lunch time and back to classes.” Juliemma, who taught at Davis Elementary and helped John with the church youth fellowship, recalled seeing a reading machine at the house. “Condi learned how to read books quickly with a speed-reading machine. I had heard that President Kennedy used one, but I had never seen one before. That was also the first time I heard of homeschooling. Angelena and John were just interested in Condi maturing and getting the best of everything. It paid off.”
Angelena also wanted Condi to have every chance to develop into a first-rate pianist, which meant she would need a sharp memory as well as excellent technique. Mother and daughter spent long hours together exploring the worlds of music and language and art, both at home and on trips into the city. And Condi adored her for it. “My mother was stunningly beautiful,” she said. “She was tremendously talented. . . . I remember how much exposure she gave me to the arts. I remember when I was six she bought me this recording of Aida.”
Angelena’s unflagging guidance of Condi’s musical training from a very early age is typical of parents who have produced world-class musicians. Many of the great pianists had, like Condi, at least one musically trained parent who nurtured their talents early and was devoted to the child’s training. Van Cliburn, for example, began taking piano lessons from his mother at age three and studied with her until he entered Juilliard at age seventeen. Earl Wild heard classical music in the home from the day he was born and also began taking lessons from his mother at age three. Claudio Arrau began lessons with his mother as a toddler and read music before he read words. Clara Haskil, Alicia de Larrocha, Glenn Gould, and Arthur Rubinstein (one of Condi’s favorite pianists) each received very early encouragement. Duke Ellington also started piano lessons as a child, and even though he often complained that he would rather be out playing baseball, his parents made him stick with it.
The benefits of a family background in music, dedicated parents, an exceptional aptitude that is recognized early (often at age three), a deep feeling for music, and prodigious raw talent have been the prerequisites for most great performers. Condi possessed all of them.
Angelena knew that her daughter was exceptional in many areas, as did the rest of the family. “My sister always knew that Condoleezza was a different child,” said Genoa Ray. To confirm their notion that she was gifted, the Rices took Condi to Southern University in Baton Rouge for psychological testing. The results were undoubtedly impressive because Angelena told the family, “I knew my baby was a genius!”
The first song Condi learned to play on the piano was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” and shortly afterward she began “accompanying” her mother at church by sitting beside her on the organ bench. At age four, she mastered a handful of pieces and gave her first recital. The intense focus on piano cut into her playtime, as did the other projects Angelena set up for her. Condi spent more time indoors—practicing piano and French—than did most of the other girls on the block. Two girls who lived across the street remembered “waiting for what seemed like hours for her to finish her latest Beethoven or Mozart and come outside.” When she did come out to play hopscotch or jump rope or play school, it wasn’t usually for long. “[She] wasn’t an outdoors child, running in the neighborhood,” recalled Ann Downing, one of Angelena’s neighbors and a member of her church. “She played with her parents, her family more or less,” she said. Angelena and John lived to fill Condi’s waking hours with productive, enriching experiences; to pour as much knowledge and culture into her young, impressive mind as possible. This dedication was based on love as much as on their longstanding family standards of achievement.
A specific incident sheds light on the depth of Angelena’s devotion. Mrs. Downing dropped in one day while Angelena was ironing the tiny lace edges of Condi’s anklet socks. “What in the world are you doing?” she asked. “I just love her so much,” replied Angelena. Mrs. Downing then remarked that with so much love, she should have another child. “I can’t take this love from Condi,” she said. John Rice held an equal amount of reverence for his daughter and felt an equal obligation to give her every opportunity. One member of John’s congregation recalled him saying, “Condi doesn’t belong to us. She belongs to God.”
By the time she began elementary school, Condi was already a serious music student and more ready to get down to business than most of her classmates. One day, while the other students were noisily blowing on their plastic flutophones and generally raising a ruckus, Condi raised her voice above the din and said to her teacher, “I’m waiting for my instructions. And would you please write the music down for me?” She was accustomed to paying attention, behaving well, and keeping an orderly routine. She acted mature because that was the way she was treated at home. “John and Angelena were the perfect parents,” said Moses Brewer, a friend of Condi’s from the University of Denver. “They never talked to her like she was a child, which is why she was mature beyond her years.” Some of her schoolmates took this maturity and perfectionism, as well as her dainty manners and habit of walking nearly on her tiptoes, as a sign of being prissy. But Condi got bored in situations where time was being wasted. And after seven years of piano, she got bored with that, too.
“I remember when I was about ten I really wanted to quit playing the piano,” she said. “I had been a child prodigy, now I was ten, there were lots of kids who could play the piano at ten.” For Condi, the uniqueness of being “the cute little piano prodigy” was over and she was ready to move on to something else. “[But] my mother said you’re not old enough or good enough to make that decision, and she was right.”
Instead, she enrolled in a local conservatory and took her playing to a new level. At age ten, she entered the Birmingham Southern Conservatory of Music, which had recently opened its doors to black students. “I think I was the first black student to go to that newly integrated conservatory,” she said, “and I began to compete in piano at that point.” The conservatory also introduced her to the basics of flute and violin, which rounded out her private study of ballet and French. And in her spare time, Condi tackled a carefully selected pile of books—always the best literature for her age group. One of the down-sides of her attentive mother’s efforts was that books were always an assignment, never a relaxing way to escape. “I grew up in a family in which my parents put me into every book club,” she said. “So I never developed the fine art of recreational reading.”
Another way Angelena sought to expand Condi’s horizons was to enroll her in different public schools, exposing her to a variety of social and educational experiences. At every school—as well as in all of her extracurricular activities—she was told to go beyond what was expected of her, always hand in work that was above average, always rise to the top. This was the unwritten yet firm law of Titusville families: to raise children who were “twice as good” as white kids to gain an equal footing and “three times as good” to surpass them. This was the driving force behind the high, uncompromising standards that the Rays and the Rices expected of their children. By encouraging them to always be far above average, they gave them the best shot at competing at an equal level when they left the secure enclave of Titusville and their families. “It wasn’t as if someone said, ‘You have to be twice as good’ and ‘Isn’t that a pity’ or ‘Isn’t that wrong,’” Condi said. “It was just, ‘You have to be twice as good.’”
“My parents were very strategic,” she explained. “I was going to be so well prepared, and I was going to do all of these things that were revered in white society so well, that I would be armored somehow from racism. I would be able to confront white society on its own terms.” Children who asked their parents about racist comments they overheard or about Jim Crow codes they observed on a rare trip to another part of Birmingham were told not to worry about it: “It’s not your problem.”
Condi’s mother refused to play by the Jim Crow rules, and Condi witnessed several episodes, usually on shopping trips, in which Angelena stood her ground. One confrontation took place at a downtown department store, where Angelena and Condi were browsing through girls’ dresses. Condi picked one that she wanted to try on, and the two walked toward a “whites only” dressing room. A white salesperson blocked their path and took the dress out of Condi’s hand. “She’ll have to try it on in there,” she told Angelena, pointing to a storage room. Without batting an eye, Angelena told the woman that her daughter would be allowed to try on her dress in a real dressing room or she would go and spend her money elsewhere. Angelena was composed, firm, and resolved. Aware that the elegantly dressed black woman before her would not stand down, the clerk decided that her commission was worth more than a public incident, and she ushered them into a dressing room as far from view as possible. “I remember the woman standing there guarding the door, worried to death she was going to lose her job,” said Condi.
A painful memory of many black Birmingham children was not being able to go to the circus when it came to town or visit the local amusement park, Kiddieland. One of Condi’s aunts recalled how upset her niece became when she learned she couldn’t visit the Alabama State Fair that was advertised all over the radio and the television once a year, tempting children with visions of petting zoos and carnival rides. “She just could not understand” why she could not go to the fair whenever she wanted, said Connie Ray. But for the most part, Condi’s parents shielded her from such disappointments, especially Kiddieland. With its Ferris wheels, carousel, cotton-candy stands, bumper cars, and other bright attractions, the whites-only park was a constant reminder that the city was divided in two. On one day each year, the park opened its gates to blacks, but the Rices never went. John and Angelena tried to keep Kiddieland out of Condi’s mind entirely, and it appeared to work. “I don’t remember being distressed,” she said. Besides, John and Angelena took her to Coney Island in Brooklyn one summer while John was taking summer courses at Columbia. John tried to downplay Kiddieland to all the kids who felt disappointed over not being able to go. Condi recalled that her father told one child, “You don’t want to go to Kiddieland. We’ll go to Disneyland.”
Condi’s parents taught her about the greater opportunities that lie beyond Birmingham, the rewards that awaited her for her hard work and high goals. “My parents had to try to explain why we wouldn’t go to the circus,” she said, “why we had to drive all the way to Washington, D.C., before we could stay in a hotel. And they had to explain why I could not have a hamburger in a restaurant but I could be president anyway, which was the way they chose to handle the situation.”
John Rice played a role in many young lives in Titusville. He had a hearty laugh, jovial outlook, imposing presence, and tireless commitment to the community. According to Condi’s second cousin Connie Rice, John was somewhat of an anomaly in his stoic line. “The Rices were kind of joyless except for Condi’s dad,” she said. His outgoing, positive outlook endeared him to the young people who came to him for guidance at school, church, and at the fellowship center he founded.
The after-school and weekend fellowship was actually a mini-academy, a place where students could study after school with teachers John brought in from the black high schools, learn how to play chess, and analyze famous works of art through field trips to museums. He also organized sports teams and set up parent-approved co-ed dances on the weekends. “He was a big man,” said Margaret Cheatham, one of the teachers who came in to tutor kids in math, algebra, and geometry. “They were amazed to see him play basketball.”
Reverend William Jones, the current pastor at Westminster Presbyterian in Birmingham, noted that John spearheaded another important organization at the church, a Boy Scout troop. He put tremendous energy, discipline, and leadership into it, which was proven by the fact that two of his scouts ascended to the highest rank. “John’s scouts made up one of the strongest troops in Birmingham, if not the strongest,” said Reverend Jones. “They had so many accomplishments, including making two Eagle Scouts. Some troops never make one in their history, but there were two from that troop. That takes years of education and commitment from the boys and from the leadership.” Only 4 percent of all Boy Scouts become Eagle Scouts, a process that involves many hours of community service as well as learning skills that lead to merit badges.
To say that John Rice was a tireless youth leader and educator is an understatement. In addition to his ministry, teaching and counseling jobs, coaching duties, and youth fellowship activities, he was also very active in the larger community. He helped set up the first Head Start center in Birmingham soon after the program was launched in Washington in 1965. He helped black youth find part-time and summer jobs as a staff member at the Birmingham Youth Opportunity Center located downtown. He was the first black person to work on that state agency staff.
As a high school guidance counselor, John had many opportunities to talk to kids about colleges and the steps necessary to be accepted into them. He tutored students for standardized tests and pressed them to take stock of their dreams and turn them into reality. He had a gift for offering both practical advice and emotional inspiration, cheering each student on to think big, dream big, and follow through. The principal of Ullman High, where John was a guidance counselor, was the uncle of Alma Powell, wife of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Her father was also a principal at another school, and she recalled that they often spoke about the Reverend John Wesley Rice as “this fine young man they were so lucky to have in Birmingham.” The kids called him “Rev,” and his daughter was crazy about him. The two were very close.
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.
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.