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Condoleezza Rice: Remembering the Civil Rights Struggles of the 50's and 60's

By Cheryl Wilcos with Kristi Watts
The 700 Club

Original Air Date: February 1, 2011

CBN.comKristi Watts sat down to talk with former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. This is part of that interview.

Birmingham, Alabama was not a sane or safe place for a black family in the 1950’s or 60’s. But, it was home for John and Angelena Rice and their daughter, Condoleezza.  The city was so torn apart by racial violence; it earned the nickname – Bombingham.

It seemed an unlikely place to produce a future United States Secretary of State.

“Birmingham Alabama, deep segregated south - a place where you couldn’t go into the Woolworth’s and have a hamburger at the lunch counter.”

Dr. Condoleezza Rice, former United States Secretary of State, says her journey from the segregated south to high academia, and then onto international diplomacy is a truly American story.

In her recent family memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, Dr. Rice recounts how her parents and grandparents created a foundation for success in the heart of the Jim Crow South.  

“This is really an American story. It’s a story that says you can come from pretty humble circumstances and you can be expected to do great things if you have a few ingredients.”

“I had parents who gave me unconditional love.  And there isn’t really any substitute for it. My parents – and really my grandparents and the community – are very much the reason that I am who I am.”

Granddaddy Rice, a sharecropper son, sold a year’s worth of cotton to pay for his freshman year at Stillman College. He had received a scholarship that paid for the rest of his education and became a Presbyterian minister. From that point forward he planted churches and schools in community after community. Condi’s father followed in his footsteps, earning a college degree.

“In my case I had parents and grandparents, and a community that was remarkable for its tenacity and for its perseverance.  These were, in many ways, ordinary people.”

Condi’s father, John Rice, was a Presbyterian minister, and a high school guidance counselor.

Her mother, Angelena, was a teacher and a musician, like her mother. Condi’s grandmother started her on the piano at age 3.  In fact, her name Condoleezza means, “play with sweetness.”

“My mother was an artist and I think I inherited her artistic temperament, her love of the arts,   her belief that the arts are really our democratic heritage. They shouldn’t be for the elite.”

The Rices invested their lives in others. The oppression and racial hatred they endured didn’t stop them from opening doors of opportunity for the next generation.

“In the afternoon my father had a youth fellowship.  That was where he brought kids from really all over the city. He would have for them Bible study, but he also had social events. 
Then, on Tuesday we had tutoring in algebra and we had tutoring in French.”

“I was very much active in the church because at a very young age I started playing the piano for the church, so we were kind of an interesting family.  My mom played the organ, my father preached and I played the piano.

While Condi was playing the piano in church on Sunday, September 15th 1963, a large explosion rocked the community. Two blocks away, a bomb blast at the 16th Street Baptist Church, killed 4 girls preparing for morning choir worship.  Black Birmingham was grief stricken. Their outrage awakened the nation. History records these murders as a tipping point in the civil rights movement. Condi remembers it as the day her playmate, Denise McNair, pictured here receiving her kindergarten diploma from Condi’s father, was killed.

“When you walk through difficult circumstances or frightening circumstances, when you’re younger, like I was as a kid, when 16th Street was bombed –you cling to your parents and they, perhaps, cling to their faith to know how to help you through that.”

“When you’re an adult, you of course, have family and friends, but you don’t cling to your parents. You have to have something though, that is there for you. I think that’s when it’s most wonderful to have had a well-developed sense of faith.”

Kristi Watts: “What can you say to many black Americans now to say, ‘No, I want you really to understand what a time that was and what it was for parents like mine to be able to overcome in that time.’”

Condoleeza:  “Well, we owe so much to our parents’ generation because they had every reason, and certainly even our grandparents, they had every reason to be beaten down – so to speak, by what they saw.  Every day the humiliations of segregation, every day the negative messages of segregation; and yet they lived lives of dignity. They lived productive lives.  That is really quite extraordinary given what they lived through.” 

“So we owe a debt of gratitude to that generation who brought us through. Of course, the one thing that both of my parents had that I’m grateful to have is a deep and abiding faith in God.  There’s no greater gift parents can give their kids than that.”


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