Free Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Felix

convicted in 2001, and Robert Chambliss in 1977. The fourth Klansman involved in the murders, Herman Cash, died before being charged.
    For all of his efforts to protect his daughter and other children in Birmingham from the ugliness of segregation, John Rice could not always evade its effects himself. He and Angelena could not, for example, take graduate classes at the University of Alabama, just blocks away from Titusville, because it did not accept black students. And voting for the pro-civil rights Democrats was impossible, as the Dixiecrats ruled the party with an iron fist in Alabama and were determined to “keep blacks in their place.” (The Dixiecrats were formed in 1948 when a group of Democrats, led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, split off from the Democratic Party to oppose Truman’s racial integration policies.) The Dixiecrats called the shots in Birmingham government, including the Democratic Party’s voting process.
    Blacks had won the right to vote with the passing of the fifteenth amendment in 1869, but the Southern states had developed several ways to circumvent the law. In the 1950s, Alabama was still enforcing various incarnations of the poll tax, a fee for voting that excluded many black people from the process. Other constraints were firmly in place when John Rice went to the polls in 1952. In a Boston Globe article, journalist Wil Haygood describes the scene that day:
In 1952, John Rice himself went to vote in Birmingham. Stood there with his ministerial credentials and all his college learning. A man pointed to a jar. The jar was full of beans. The man told Reverend John Rice that if he could guess the number of beans in the jar, he could vote.
    John had learned from a few Republicans in his congregation that the GOP did not use such tactics. He signed up for the Republican Party that day and never looked back. At the Republican National Convention, Condi shared this story about her father. “The first Republican that I knew was my father, John Rice, and he is still the Republican I admire most,” she said. “My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. I want you to know that my father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.”
    When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2, 1964, the Rices watched the historic event on television. A couple of days later they went to a historically all-white restaurant in Birmingham for the first time. “The people there stopped eating for a couple of minutes,” said Condi, but then the novelty wore off and everyone went about their business. The changes weren’t so smooth everywhere, however. “A few weeks later we went through a drive-in,” she said, “and when we drove away I bit into my hamburger—and it was all onions.” Signing slain President Kennedy’s bill into law made President Johnson “a revered figure” in the Rice household. Condi believes that an important part of the civil rights story also lies in the people who were ready to put the new laws into practice in their lives, the blacks who had prepared themselves through education. “The legal changes made a tremendous difference,” she said, “but not in the absence of people who were already prepared to take advantage of them, and therefore took full advantage of them. You can’t write them out of the story.”
    Condi is aware that her parents’ approach to segregation—how they dealt with it and how they discussed it with her—and their uncompromising attitude about education made an enormous impact on her life. “I am so grateful to my parents for helping me through that period,” she said of her childhood in Birmingham. “They explained to me carefully what was going on, and they did so without any bitterness. It was in the very air we breathed that education was the way out. . . . Among all my friends, the kids I grew up with, there was . . .