Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (5 page)

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.”

THREE

Twice as Good

“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.