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LONG AGO, in segregated Birmingham, on the children's floor of a downtown department store, a white saleslady spotted an exquisitely dressed black mother heading with her young daughter for fitting rooms reserved for whites only. The year was 1961, and downtown Birmingham was an apartheid society, with blacks assigned inferior status in where they ate, where they relieved themselves, even where little girls tried on pretty dresses.
The saleslady stepped into the path of the mother and child, took the dress from the little girl and motioned to a storage room. "She'll have to try it on in there," she said.
The first black female national security adviser, Rice grew up in the segregated South but watchful parents who taught her to "confront white society on its own terms."
(Greg Miller)
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No sooner had the clerk laid down the law than the black mother upped the ante. Stepping coolly out of her caste as a "colored" woman, she addressed the clerk as the hired help she was: "My daughter will try on this dress in a dressing room, or I'm not spending my money here."
Condoleezza Rice was only 7 years old then. But even now, at 46, in her White House office down the corridor from President Bush, America's national security adviser has a vivid memory of her mother standing her ground in Birmingham, with nothing on her side but her dignity and her wallet. And another memory, equally clear, of the result: The white salesclerk wilting like a flower at her mother's dare, furtively guiding them to an out-of-the-way dressing room in hopes of salvaging her commission.
"I remember the woman standing there guarding the door, worried to death she was going to lose her job," says Rice.
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THE FIRST BLACK FEMALE national security adviser learned her first lessons about might and right in segregated Birmingham. The encounter in the department store, one of many life lessons, was hardly exceptional. Rice's parents belonged to a black elite, based more on education than on money. Long before there was a civil rights movement, they had learned from their own parents how to extract dignity from a system designed to crush it. Now they were training their only child to do the same, not through the mass movement the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. soon would bring to Birmingham, but as a soloist.
She began piano lessons at age 3 and, at 4, accompanied the choir at the church her father pastored, dressed always like a vision in the finest clothes her middle-class parents could buy. She read fluently at 5, and when the superintendent of Negro schools deemed her too young for first grade, her mother – rather than hold her back – took a year off from work and taught her at home.
"My parents were very strategic," explains Rice. "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."
The Rev. John W. Rice Jr. and his schoolteacher wife, Angelena, were well equipped for this mission. Both were descended from ancestors who, going back to slavery, seized on education as the way up and out. John Rice, as a preacher and high school guidance counselor, was an "education evangelist," in his daughter's eyes, inspiring the poor as well as the more privileged to pursue college.
"He wanted us to have every advantage a child could have," remembers Eva Carter, a disciple of his at church and at school. "If the kids in Mountain Brook had it, we were going to have it."
Mountain Brook, as it happens, is where I grew up. I am two years older than Condoleezza Rice, and as young girls we witnessed the same transformational history – from opposite sides of the color line. People have asked if we knew each other, a natural enough question, except that in our case it's preposterous. As Martin Luther King famously wrote in 1963 from our city jail, Birmingham was "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States."
Mountain Brook was a lily-white suburb, its very name synonymous with money and privilege. Rice's neighborhood of Titusville was proudly ascendant, the first subdivision built for a rising, postwar black middle class.
This was a time and place that shaped everyone born into it. Our generation started life in a world where "colored" and "white" signs demarcated every public space, where the Ku Klux Klan bombed dozens of black homes and churches with impunity, and where history, money and police power conspired mightily against change. And then that world crumbled before our eyes.
I saw all this much as history now portrays it – a mass movement of the powerless, coupled with the force of federal law, triumphing over oppression.
Condi Rice saw it differently. In her own family, she says, liberation came not through a movement but from generations of ancestors navigating oppression with individual will, wits and, eventually, wallets – long before King or the federal government took up the cause. It is one of her frustrations, she says, that people routinely assume she was beaten down or deprived as a child until the civil rights movement arrived. "My family is third-generation college-educated," she says with proud defiance. "I should've gotten to where I am."
This is a rare educational pedigree for our generation, rarer still among blacks from Birmingham. Mentioning it is Rice's way of stopping people in their mental tracks, signaling that she is not what they expect, that her Birmingham story is very different from the one they know. She may have grown up in segregation. She may have had a friend who died in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. But nothing in that history, as she lived it, makes her uncomfortable in the white male bastion of national security – or, for that matter, in the Republican Party.
To many black leaders, hers is a perspective skewed by privilege and naivete. But to Rice, it is the truth, and it is ingrained in her in ways she says she continues to discover – from her fierce independence, to her skepticism of big government, to her view of America's role in the world, even to her enduring love of pretty dresses. "Childhood matters," she says.
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"IT'S AN EXTRAORDINARY STORY, how you come out of such an oppressive system with a sense of self."
That isn't Condi Rice talking. It's Connie Rice, her second cousin. But such is the power of the family narrative that their accounts are almost interchangeable. Connie Rice, 44, is a leading civil rights attorney in Los Angeles, and remarkably like her second cousin in temperament and outlook. Connie Rice is neither Republican nor Democratic. She sues large institutions like the L.A. police department and school district on behalf of poor people. Her issue, perhaps not surprisingly, is empowerment.
"Our grandfathers had this indomitable outlook," says Connie Rice. "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. The Rices were kind of joyless except for Condi's dad. But if there's one thing about Rice kids, there is nothing crushed about us – not our spirit, not our intellect, nothing. We just can't be conquered."
On both sides of her family, Condi Rice is descended from white slave owners as well as black slaves; and the slaves were mostly "house slaves," as opposed to "field slaves," according to Connie Rice. This gave them proximity to privilege, and they used it to become educated, the family says – an imperative they passed like a torch through the generations.
At the Republican National Convention last summer, Condi Rice proudly told the story of "Granddaddy Rice," who made his way from the south Alabama cotton fields to college in 1918, when even black high schools were a rarity. Born Methodist – one of nine children of former house slaves who became tenant farmers after emancipation – he was reborn a Presbyterian when he learned scholarships were available to nearby Stillman College, a white-run seminary that trained black men as Presbyterian ministers. The church later sent him to Birmingham to found Westminster Presbyterian Church, where he made a mission of helping his flock send children to college, particularly Stillman.
Every year at exam time he traveled to the campus by bus (he did not own a car) to advocate for students whose unpaid tuition bills otherwise would have disqualified them from taking finals, recalls Evelyn Glover, one of his beneficiaries.
"I can see him even now, walking stern and erect to the president's door," says Glover, straightening her back as if to evoke the old Christian soldier. "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 take those exams, and I know our parents didn't have the money."
A similarly impregnable sense of self traveled undiluted, through slavery and segregation, in Angelena Rice's bloodline. "Always remember, you're a Ray!" Condi Rice still can hear her maternal grandfather, Albert Robinson Ray III, instructing her and her cousins.
"That meant: You have control, you're proud, you have integrity, nobody can take those things away from you," Rice translates.
Race was not mentioned in this message, but it was implicit. Albert Ray III was the son of a white plantation owner and a favored black servant from an educated family. His mother had two sisters who were among the first nursing graduates at nearby Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington with a vision like Rice's ancestors' – progress through education, self-reliance and patience.
Albert Ray left home as a boy, determined never to allow segregation to define his self-worth, according to his surviving children. In their youth in the 1930s and '40s, they say, other black children routinely cooked and cleaned for white families to augment family income. But not Rays. Others drank from "colored" fountains and used "colored" latrines. But not Rays.
"Daddy told us, 'Wait till you get home to drink. Wait till you get home to go to the bathroom.' If you had to go in the back door, we just wouldn't go," says his son Alto Ray, Condi Rice's closest uncle. "As a matter of fact, I never got on a bus, a segregated bus, in my life."
Unlike most blacks in Birmingham, Albert Ray could afford a car. He was a coal miner at 18 but soon founded his own blacksmithing business, and later built homes. He and his wife put all five of their children through college. "I may have worked in the mines," he said often. "My children will not."
Rice acknowledges that her ancestors had advantages within their disadvantage, but she believes these came from self-reliance, not privilege.
"I think that black Americans of my grandparents' ilk had liberated themselves," she says. "They had broken the code. They had figured out how to make an extraordinarily comfortable and fulfilling life despite the circumstances. They did not feel that they were captives."
This history gives Rice a strong sense of blackness, but also some discomfort with being identified as African American. She says the term suggests to her that blacks are just another immigrant group, like Italian Americans, Mexican Americans or Japanese Americans.
"It isn't an immigrant story. It's a different story," she says. "We have a language for dealing with immigration, but not with race, where we came to this country together but with blacks enslaved. I often talk about how when America was founded it had a birth defect, with slavery. It was there from the beginning . . .
"I know the motivation for 'African American' was to connect black Americans with the African heritage, and that part I applaud," she says. "But it implies a pure connection to Africa that doesn't go through the experiences of slavery or a mixing of the blood."
In other words, it leaves Condoleezza Rice out of the story.
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FROM INSIDE HER PARENTS' MODEST, two-bedroom bungalow at the corner of Center Way and Ninth Terrace, Condi Rice saw herself as just one of the girls. All her playmates lived in an all black, upwardly mobile world. From school to church to ballet classes, they all had the same watchwords – "twice as good," which meant you had to be twice as good as white kids to pull even (three times as good to pass them).
Racism was always there, "but so there – there all the time – that you ceased to notice its existence," Rice recalls. If children asked about it, she and her friends remember, grown-ups often responded, "Don't worry about it. It's not your problem."
"The focus was on hard work, striving to be best, not allowing ourselves to be sorry, never, ever seeing ourselves as victims," recalls Freeman Hrabowski, then an honor student protege of John Rice's at Ullman High, now president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
John Rice was a player in many families' dreams for their children, according to another daughter of black Birmingham educators – Alma Powell, wife of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose uncle happened to be the Ullman principal. She remembers hearing her uncle and father, also a principal, speak often of "this fine young man they were so lucky to have in Birmingham."
"Rev," as the boys called him, ran a youth fellowship known widely as a one-stop antidote to the deprivations of segregation. He brought in the best teachers from the Negro school system to make sure his kids knew their stuff; gave lessons in chess, ping-pong and the waltz; led trips to the art museum. The beefy former football coach also organized after-school sports. And on weekends, when black kids had few places to gather, he threw co-ed dances, a brash departure from the conduct code of Negro ministers, but parents didn't worry because the jovial counselor-reverend chaperoned them himself.
Condi Rice adored him. She became a pint-size football aficionado at his knee, and proclaimed confidently to her neighbor, Carolyn Hunter, "When I grow up I'm going to marry a professional football player!"
Rice remembers seething at well-off parishioners who threatened to revolt when her father recruited kids from housing projects – "the wrong kind," in the opponents' words – to his youth fellowship. "My father hated classism," she says. She clucks her tongue in disgust at the memory of one church elder who warned, "These kids won't know how to behave!"
"His view was, 'These kids could be like yours,' " she says. "That was his focus on education."
It was also his view of religion. "You're cared about, you're guided, you can never fall too far, and if you do, there's a personal faith to pick you up," is how she says he explained God to all children.
But for all the focus on ties that bind, Condi Rice lived a life apart. With few leisure or entertainment outlets open to blacks, other families had as much money to spend, but few lavished it so purposefully on a child. Besides piano lessons with her grandmother, who was a classical pianist, she took dance, flute, violin and French.
Her friends across the street, Carole Smitherman and Vanessa Hunter, remember waiting for what seemed like hours for her to finish her latest Beethoven or Mozart and come outside. The three girls loved playing school in the Hunters' garage, where Vanessa's father, an architect, had erected a grand chalkboard. Condi's favorite role was teacher, standing at the blackboard, chalk and book in hand, lecturing an assemblage of girls and dolls.
But even as she acted out little-girl fantasies, her parents had their eyes on their prize. Carolyn Hunter, Vanessa's mother, remembers closing the garage door one summer day to keep out mosquitoes, when Condi stopped her: "'Miz Hunter, if you let the door down, I'll have to go home.' "
"I said, 'Why, baby?' " Hunter recalls, "and she said, 'My mama can't watch me.' "
"It was great being my parents' daughter, but sometimes it was terrible," Rice confesses. She remembers a variety show in grade school for which she and other girls planned to dress up as the Supremes. "And my father decided it was undignified," she says. Her parents arranged instead for her to tap dance – "by myself!" – which she'd never done. "They went and hired a tap dance teacher. I had this peculiar outfit, and my father stood there by the stage with his arms crossed to make sure nobody laughed," she says. "That's the way my parents were. I was always supposed to do something different and special, and slightly more refined."
The only place most black children encountered whites was downtown, where elaborate Jim Crow laws maintained distance amid proximity – always at the expense of black dignity. Parents of Rice's friends recall the anguish of having children ask, "Why?" – then having to explain it was because their skin was black.
"It used to hurt my heart," Carolyn Hunter says, closing her eyes as if feeling the pain again. "You had to take it to God, and sometimes it seemed like even He wasn't listening," says Doris Mitchell, whose two daughters were friends of Condi's.
All of which makes Angelena Rice's stand in the fitting room door even more remarkable. And it was not her only stand. Condi Rice recalls another shopping trip when she saw a pretty hat and was touching it admiringly, when a white saleswoman snapped, as if addressing a dog, "Get your hands off that!" In an instant, Angelena Rice was warning the woman through clenched teeth, "Don't talk to my daughter that way," then lovingly instructing her little girl, "Condoleezza, go touch every hat in this store." Rice happily complied.
Besides nerves of steel, Angelena Rice had a strategic grasp of the power of her purse. She even took her daughter shopping in Mountain Brook – where black people rarely appeared except as servants – and bought clothes at the exclusive Canterbury Shop, specializing in "fine children's wear."
Indeed, class took the edge off race, even then. "We didn't have riffraff of any color. We attracted the cream," remembers Bernard Goldstein, one of the owners. "We did have a few black customers, and they were educated people, people of means, like our white customers. We were happy to have them. They wanted the best. They weren't looking for bargains."
Perhaps nothing more powerfully illustrates the independence of Rice's mind-set than her attitude toward the most dazzling children's scene in Birmingham – Kiddieland. It wasn't special by today's standards, but Ferris wheels, bumper cars and carousels constituted a wonderland in our sooty steel town. A whites-only wonderland, that is.
"I'd cry every time I passed there," Freeman Hrabowski recalls. "I'd ask my parents, 'Why can't we go?' The children looked like they were having the time of their lives. Imagine a child seeing that and not being able to go in."
King even referenced Kiddieland in his famous Letter From Birmingham Jail: "You suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes . . . and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky . . ."
But Kiddieland never darkened Condi Rice's mental sky. "All of us knew Kiddieland was off limits," she says. "I don't remember being distressed. I never was one much for fairs or theme parks." Besides, she remembers a friend's father telling her Kiddieland was nothing special. "He said, 'You don't want to go to Kiddieland. We'll go to Disneyland.' "
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WHEN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT came to Birmingham, the Rice family – like middle-class blacks in general – kept its distance.
Condi Rice says her father embraced its goals, but not its means. "My father was not a march-in-the-street preacher," she says. He strenuously opposed the tactic that ultimately broke white business resistance to ending segregation in stores downtown – recruiting children to march into police commissioner Bull Connor's phalanx of officers, police dogs and fire hoses, and overflow the jails. "He saw no reason to put children at risk," Rice says. "He would never put his own child at risk."
"If we'd waited for the middle class to lead us, we'd still be waiting," says the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, now 79, who led the local movement from Bethel Baptist Church, a poor and working-class flock.
As throngs of children headed for the streets, Eva Carter, then an Ullman student, took John Rice's advice not to join them. "There's a better way," she remembers him saying. "I want you to fight with your mind."
In the eyes of the Rev. C. Herbert Oliver, a Birmingham civil rights leader at the time, this was a perspective of privilege. "The middle-class Negro was doing quite well," he says. "They had jobs. They could shop. But they were not there to create the change so jobs could become available. We'd still be in a bad way if we'd followed that alone."
Condi Rice believes segregation was collapsing of its own weight before federal law dismantled it – a view she says she shared recently with official visitors from Northern Ireland. "I said I felt that segregation had become not just a real moral problem, but it had become a real pain in the neck for some [white] people," she says. "People had begun to make their own little accommodations."
She recalls a visit with her parents to a white doctor when her mother had a bronchial infection. Dressed finely, as always, the trio arrived to find a well-appointed reception area, where white people were sitting. The receptionist sent them upstairs to the "colored waiting room," a cramped, dark space with peeling paint. But after the appointment, Rice recalls, the doctor walked them to his main reception area and said, "Reverend Rice, when you come back, why don't you come in after 5 o'clock on Saturday? You could come right in here."
Rice says she never thought of the doctor's offer as a concession to her parents' class. "This was about race, not class," she says. What, then, of the blacks left behind in the colored waiting room? She pauses, as if revisiting a scene long fixed in her memory. "Well, it was about class, too," she says.
Harold Jackson, one of the Birmingham housing project recruits to John Rice's youth fellowship, says he and his widowed mother and four brothers sat in colored waiting rooms until the bitter end, and never thought of protesting.
"Not until I became an adult did I think about being taken to an alley to go to the bathroom downtown," says Jackson, who won a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing at the Birmingham News and now is an editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. "I never thought about the fact that there were buildings, and there had to be bathrooms in them. I don't remember asking why I had to go outside. I certainly now, in retrospect, remember riding on the back of the bus. But I never thought about it at the time. We faced a lot of things, often without explanation."
Of Rice's experiences, he says, "The way to overcome was with money. The idea always was: If you spend enough money with a white person, they'll be cordial. Money is the conqueror."
As marchers filled the streets and the jails in May 1963, John Rice knew well that history was being made, and he made sure his daughter witnessed it, albeit from a safe distance. She remembers riding at age 8 with him to watch demonstrations from a few blocks away, and later to the state fairgrounds, where arrested youths were being held temporarily. Many of them were his students, and he walked the crowd making sure they were safe, with his little girl high atop his broad shoulders.
Among the arrested students were Hrabowski and George Hunter III, the brother of Rice's across-the-street friend Vanessa. The boys had parents like the Rices, who had college degrees and raised their children to spurn thoughts of victimhood. But both now say going to jail with King to end segregation was their ultimate liberation.
Carolyn Hunter remembers picking up her telephone to hear her son's voice from the city jail. "I told him I'd put up my house to get him out," Hunter says. "He said, 'Don't, Mama. I can take it. I'm tired of sitting at the back of the bus.' "
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ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1963, at 10:24 a.m., a powerful dynamite bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Beneath the rubble were four small bodies, stacked atop one another like lumber. Four girls, ages 11 to 14. Denise McNair, the youngest, had been Condi Rice's schoolmate and friend – a fellow star of the neighborhood's twice-as-good generation. Cynthia Wesley was that smart, popular girl who always stood out at youth fellowship meetings.
Rice remembers hearing the thunderous explosion, even two miles away, feeling the earth shudder under her father's church, watching someone stagger in with the barest details – "a terrible event, a bombing at Sixteenth Street Church." She's not sure when she learned about Denise, or Cynthia, although she remembers how very small the caskets looked as the funeral procession passed by.
In white Birmingham, the carnage of innocents dealt the death blow to a long, unspoken partnership between the business elite and segregation's vigilante enforcers. It would take 14 years for the first suspect to come to trial, but even so, Klan leaders knew their glory days were numbered, and they disavowed the bombers as breakaway extremists.
For the children of Titusville, the terror was overpowering. All four victims had heard the assurances they had heard: "Don't worry about it. It's not your problem."
Now it was.
Rice remembers being frightened, by not only the church bombing but many others before and after. By this time, Birmingham was known to the world as Bombingham. One bomb devastated the home of the Rices' friend Arthur Shores, a prominent black lawyer for civil rights causes. A firebomb was tossed in Titusville, but didn't go off. Rice's father went to police headquarters to demand an investigation. "They didn't investigate," she says. "They never investigated."
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