Imagine growing up in the heart of the segregated South and being told you could not eat a hamburger at Woolworth’s because the color of your skin was too dark, but you could become President of the United States if you so desired. This is exactly the juxtaposition John and Angelena Rice faced while trying to instill in their bright, young daughter the limitless possibilities of the American Dream. Condoleezza Rice may not be president–yet–but she is at the President’s side making crucial policy decisions that are shaping this country’s foreign relations daily. As National Security Advisor her responsibilities are immense, but the pressures of her position appear to be handled with a graceful ease and a sharp readiness for the unexpected.

Surely, Condoleezza Rice has conquered every obstacle set before her, and is a living testimony of pure will power. But where did such majestic inner strength come from? What motivated her to attain that invincible intellectual prowess? And who inspired her to be a stalwart leader among leaders? And how can we benefit from her experience? The answers lie in Condoleezza’s story–in her history as well as where she stands today.

With parents who taught her by example to accomplish her goals and school mentors who believed in her gifts of excellence, Condoleezza has undoubtedly grown into a woman with a razor sharp mind and confidence of steel. At the Republican National Convention in 2000 Rice spoke about the qualities required of leadership. She said, “Leadership is hard work” because “leaders are made not born.” Her innate strength stems from a bloodline of courageous ancestors who fought their way out of the shackles of slavery and into a world of opportunity, that they personally endeavored to create. Their stories have shaped and molded her into the leader that stands before us today.

In March, Condoleezza was presented with the NAACP Image Award, which honors those who have advanced the cause of minorities through leadership. In her acceptance speech she said, “though Birmingham had its limits, they [parents] told me that Birmingham’s limits were not mine.” Her black identity has never proven to be an academic or professional hindrance so Condoleezza continues to strive to learn, to achieve, to teach, and to share her family’s ideals of the limitless possibilities of the American Dream.

For several generations the Rice family has independently navigated a course toward freedom. Even while Condoleezza’s ancestors were captive to white slave owners, their captivity meant more of a physical limitation than a deprivation of will. During her family’s time spent as slaves their labor was done mostly in the house rather than out in the field, and because of their propinquity to resources they were able to pull themselves in the direction of upward mobility. Before Civil Rights laws could grant them access to prestigious universities or jobs with high paying salaries, the Rice family found it’s way up and out of the established norm of black subservience. Believing that education was the means to outward ascendancy, the Rice family seized every opportunity for learning as it came along. “I think that black Americans of my grandparents’ ilk had liberated themselves,” observes Condoleezza. “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.”

It was Condoleezza’s grandfather who was the first to break the mold. At the Republican National Convention, she shared a few revering thoughts about “Granddaddy Rice’s” journey to personal autonomy. “He was the son of a farmer in rural Alabama, but he recognized the importance of education. Around 1918, 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 50 miles away. So Granddaddy saved up his cotton for tuition and off he went to Tuscaloosa.”

However, after the first year of college her grandfather’s supply of cotton had diminished and he wasn’t quite sure how he would pay for school tuition. But with God watching over him, according to Condoleezza, he was given an answer. “My grandfather asked how those other boys were staying in school, and he was told that they had what was called a scholarship.” But the scholarship was conditional and it meant her grandfather would have to study to become a Presbyterian minister. Becoming a minister was just what her grandfather had in mind. If it meant he could stay in school, the proposal would be accepted with gratitude and the eventual goal of living an improved life. The energy of self-determination and the acquisition of knowledge were goals successfully passed down through the generations to Condoleezza. Her parents wanted her to have every possible advantage, so they tutored her in French, provided her with ice-skating lessons, dance lessons, and classical music training. Young Condoleezza was able to play the flute, violin, and her favorite of all, the piano. Classical piano had been a talent amongst the Rice women for three generations. Her grandmother had tutored her as a little girl, and her mother, Angelena, continued the tradition by naming her daughter with the Italian musical term Con Dulce, or Con Dolcezza, which means to play ‘with sweetness.’

Both of her parents were educators. The late John W. Rice was initially a Presbyterian minister and later the assistant vice chancellor of Denver University. The late Angelena Ray Rice was a musician and longtime high school teacher. Due to their established careers, the Rice’s were able to use their pocket book as a resource against blatant discrimination, and it helped little Condoleezza-also known as Condi-to rebuff thoughts of racial barriers. Condoleezza recounts a shopping experience with her intrepid mother in an upper class hat shop reserved mostly for whites. Upon touching a hat that had engaged her attention, the saleslady yelled, “Get your hands off that!” Angelena was infuriated by the woman’s condescending command to her little girl, so she snapped right back, “Don’t talk to my daughter that way,” and then instructed little Condi to touch “every hat” in the store. Condoleezza complied and the store lady kept quiet, while Angelena kept a firm grasp over the power of her wallet.

Admittedly, Condoleezza grew up ‘with sugar and spice and everything nice,’ as every little girl should. Yet outside her insular home-life there were several disturbing racial clashes happening in the streets of Birmingham. One of Condoleezza’s girlhood companions was killed in 1963 when a bomb hit her local church. Little Condi was coming of age when the Ku Klux Klan still reigned, but also as a new era of civil rights was dawning. During the civil rights movement, the Rice family kept a secure distance from the ensuing violence. Although the Rice’s believed in it’s goals, they did not agree with the movement’s tactics. John Rice did not believe it was suitable for children to march in the streets with police dogs and fire hoses posing a direct threat.

This did not mean that the Rice’s were isolationists or did not involve themselves in the protection and safety of their community. When threats were made, or bombs went off, John Rice was at the police station requesting an investigation. These requests were usually ignored, leaving the community to fend for itself. So the men of the neighborhood, including John, would venture out into the streets at night with shotguns in hand to patrol the area and defend their homes.

Rice recently told ABC News, “My parents really provided a shield as much as they could against the horrors of Birmingham.” However, her parents also understood the positive ramifications of civil rights, and wanted their daughter to partake in its history. So Condoleezza’s parents took her to see the marchers, and she stood witness to the silent message spoken by the masses, and felt the just cause of the people, all the while maintaining a distance for fear of the very real threat of unexpected bombings or police brutality.

By 1964 African Americans had the Civil Rights act on their side, which helped neutralize the mounting tension. While federal law ushered in the protection of fundamental rights, Condoleezza believes that the individuals who comprised the movement had already defined equality, and through individual will power they brought equality to the forefront of daily living. She vehemently opposes the notion that Black people were helpless without the Civil Rights Act, and firmly attests to the values of self-determination and self-reliance as the necessary pre-cursors of true liberation. One thing her father always told people was to fight with their minds as opposed to fighting in the streets. This philosophy rang true with Condoleezza who interpreted it as a personal responsibility to acquire knowledge and to use that knowledge to gain advantage. What other solution do you have “when race is a factor?” That accepted–her continued strategy was to excel in every endeavor to which she had made a commitment.

By the young age of fifteen, the highly intelligent Rice went to the University of Denver with plans to pursue a career as a pianist. Although she could play beautifully, once she reached her sophomore year, Rice felt she did not have the kind of blue-ribbon talent to become a distinguished musician. Recently, she quipped to ABC News that she didn’t want to end up teaching “13-year-olds to murder Beethoven.” While on a desperate search for a major, Condoleezza walked into Josef Korbel’s classroom. He was lecturing on Josef Stalin and she instantaneously fell in love with Soviet politics. Rice truly admired Korbel and held him up as an exemplary professor–one whom she would later emulate with her own passion for teaching. She has admitted, “I really adored him I really did. He’s the reason I’m in this field.” Korbel, who is also Madeline Albright’s father and a former Czech diplomat, became a father figure to Condoleezza. She has described Korbel as one of the most central figures in her life, next to her parents.

Under Korbel’s positive influence, Rice went on to graduate from the University of Denver at the age of nineteen with a bachelor’s degree in political science. She eventually earned a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame and a doctorate in political science from the University of Denver’s Graduate School of International Studies. By the age of twenty-six Rice became an assistant professor at Stanford University, and by twenty-nine she had already won the highest award for teaching excellence–the Walter J. Gores Award.

As professor, and later as Provost, at Stanford University, Condoleezza’s empowering message to students and professors alike was to demand that studying and teaching come “with passion, skill and determination.” In a speech given to the Stanford business school she said, “the very best minds have a sense of passion about ideas and knowledge, and they can transmit the knowledge the best.” One of Rice’s biggest historical and political role models is Henry Kissinger, and in the same speech she spoke about his philosophy on educated young minds entering the business world that are forced to make crucial split-second decisions. Referencing Kissinger, she said that students have an “incentive” to be impassioned by their studies because once you’ve graduated “you serve in business and you trade on the intellectual capital you’ve already acquired.” In other words your knowledge is what allows you to be heard and to get ahead. Like the spellbinding influence of Korbel on his students, Rice too strove to incite a passion for education within her students. From the moment Rice began teaching political science from her zealous podium, she had already set herself apart in her devotion to students and absolute dedication to the University. And her performance did not go unnoticed.

While teaching at Stanford she was invited to a dinner party where she met Brent Scowcroft, President Ford’s National Security Advisor. Scowcroft recalls that “there were some of the best brains in the business” in arms-control and security in attendance. He continued, “and here in this group was this young slip of a girl. And she spoke up. She wasn’t cowed by the company she was in. And she made sense. I thought I better get to know her.”
By 1989, President George H.W. Bush selected Rice to advise him on Soviet affairs, and by the personal request of Brent Scowcroft she was asked to join the National Security Council, first as an assistant to the President on National Security, and then as the senior director of Soviet and Eastern European affairs. Little Condi was President Bush’s chief advisor for the summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev on superpowers and global peace. In an article by Steve Kettmann, he describes how Bush “could not have been more flattering in introducing Rice to Mikhail Gorbachev.” Bush said, “This is Condoleezza Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.”

From Washington, Condoleezza trekked back to Stanford, but this time not as a professor. She had been elected to become Provost of Stanford, which placed her second in command at the institution as the chief academic and budget officer. Her efforts and contributions in research further lead her to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, which is an internationally renowned think tank at Stanford. She has also written several books on Russian affairs and arms-control including, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed” (1995), “The Gorbachev Era” (1986), and “Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army” (1984).

Aside from her long list of accolades, people are often curious what challenges Condoleezza has encountered as a headstrong black female navigating her way into the upper echelons of white fraternal government and academia. Not surprisingly, Rice has been the first in a list of several high-ranking authority positions. It was in 1989, that she became the highest-ranking African American woman ever on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush’s administration; and only four years later, in 1993, when she became the youngest and first black female Provost at Stanford University. Now it is 2002 and she is once again the first woman to hold the position as National Security Advisor for the George W. Bush administration.

Has her so-called “minority-ness” abetted her rise to the top, or has it presented itself as an obstacle? Describing her thoughts on being a minority, she asserts, “Frankly, I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. I can’t go back and recreate myself as a white male.” And she doesn’t go back and think about her disadvantages either. Condoleezza firmly believes, “In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going.” Some of Condoleezza’s critics might suggest that she came from a place of privilege. And while she admits that she did have advantages, she says “some of it was class, a lot of it was just parents.”

To this day, Condoleezza speaks with a strong reverence about her parents, and is supremely grateful to them for the morals and principles she was reared by. Rice explains that her “parents were very strategic” in their goals for her rise to the top. “I was going to be so well prepared, and I was going to do all of these things that were valued 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.” Although Angelena, who died in 1985 from breast cancer, did not live to see her daughter climb the ranks of political success, her father, John, was alive to witness his daughter nominated as National Security Advisor.

Her father’s legacy of community service lives on through Condoleezza, who is also a philanthropist at heart. While living in the Silicon Valley and teaching at Stanford, Condoleezza noticed a need within the community for an after school program geared to meet the needs of students with exceptional academic qualifications. She co-founded the Center for a New Generation, which is dedicated to serving youth of all backgrounds, especially ones who are on the accelerated path, and who come from an underprivileged background. Under Condoleezza’s influence the club was designed as an academic enrichment program, not just an after school day care facility. The mission of the center is to inspire and enable young people to reach their potential. So the children’s afternoons are filled with math, science, and language arts tutorials, as well as performing arts like dance, music, and drama. Condoleezza has said that she hopes the “black middle class would spend less time thinking about itself and more time worrying about the witches’ brew that is poverty and race. That is something that those of us who are black and privileged have a lot of responsibility for.” As a leader in her community she has taken on that commission by keeping children turned on to learning, and allowing them to develop the qualities necessary to become responsible citizens and leaders. She is continuing the Rice family tradition of leadership and learning through young minds everywhere.

Due to the current state of affairs, Ms. Rice was not available for an interview. The Black Perspective would like to acknowledge the following resources:
• An outstanding article titled, “Lessons of Might and Right,” by Dale Russakoff, (first published in the Washington Post on September 9, 2001 pg. W23)
• An abcNEWS.com report, titled “Bush’s Foreign Policy Guru,” contributing writer Gayle Tzemach.
•The Washington Post staff article titled, “For Rice, a Daunting Challenge Ahead”