Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (4 page)

The weighty issues discussed by the NSA and the president demand that the two people have an enormously trusting relationship. By referring to Condi as a “close confidant,” entrusting her to teach him about world affairs, consistently asking for her opinion in addition to the views she’s collected, and sending her out on crucial assignments, it’s evident that George W. is as trusting of Rice as his father was of his NSA, Brent Scowcroft.

In a letter the senior Bush wrote to Scowcroft after a NATO meeting in May, 1989, he revealed how heavily he relied upon his advice and support. “I will remember the sound advice you have given me. Thanks for your key role. Thanks for being at my side. Thanks for being my trusted friend.” In a footnote in his memoir, Bush further indicated his reliance upon Scowcroft. “I always suspected Brent would have preferred to have been secretary of defense, but I needed him at my side in the White House.” George W. feels the same way about Condi Rice.

Condi may have preferred to manage the National Football League after the campaign, but she agreed to stay by George W.’s side instead. Happily for the president-elect, Paul Tagliabue held onto his job as commissioner of the NFL and the subject never came up. For Condi, the NFL office on Park Avenue in New York would have to remain a fantasy. In the meantime, she was about to step into a role that has been described as “one of the single most important positions in the American government.”

TWO

An American Legacy

“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.