Free Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Felix Page A

no doubt in our minds that we would grow up and go to colleges—integrated colleges—just like other Americans.”
    In 1965, Condi’s father took a job that launched him into a new phase of his career. As dean of students at Stillman College, he became part of the leadership of an institution that figured prominently in the Rice family legacy. This is where Condi’s “Grandaddy Rice” came to get an education, lift himself out of the sharecroppers’ fields, and rechart the family’s journey in the church by training as a Presbyterian minister.
    By the time John arrived as the new dean, Stillman had come a long way since its beginnings as “an institute for the training of Negro pastors” in 1876. In 1930, it added a women’s nursing training school, and in 1953, became an accredited four-year college by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Just four years before John arrived, the college had become a member of the United Negro College Fund, making it eligible for funds from the forty-college cooperative.
    With this new job, the Rices moved to Tuscaloosa, less than sixty miles from Birmingham. They were still close enough to keep in close touch with relatives and friends, as the trip was a quick drive on newly completed Interstate 20. The position advanced John in his profession, moving him out of the world of secondary education. From that point on, he would continue to work with young people as part of his church and volunteer activities, but his academic work would involve young, college-age adults. His number-one pupil, his “Little Star,” was growing up, too.

FOUR

    Chopin, Shakespeare, or Soviets?
“I don’t ever remember thinking I was an exceptional student. I did think I was a good pianist.”
    —Condoleezza Rice
     
     
     
     
     
     
    AFTER working at Stillman College for three years, John Rice received a new job offer that involved a much bigger move for the family. This time the change of locale would have a greater impact on Condi’s life than the family’s initial move out of Birmingham, for not only did they leave their family and friends in Alabama, they left the South entirely. John’s new job came about after he completed his summer graduate courses at the University of Denver and received a master of arts in education on June 10, 1969. That year the university offered him a position as assistant director of admissions, and he soon began teaching as well.
    From the start, John Rice worked in the academic as well as the administrative halls of the university. He began to coordinate and teach a class entitled “Black Experience in America,” and over the years expanded the scope of the course to include notable figures who held sessions with students and gave formal presentations that were open to the public. The class discussed the black vote, the role of blacks in politics, and various cultural topics, and John invited national-level speakers to speak, including Howard Robinson, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Reverend Channing Phillips, the first black person to be nominated for the presidency of the United States. One seminar focused on blacks in popular culture and featured Gordon Parks, director and producer of Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score , who led a discussion on “The Black Man in the Movies.”
    Condi recalled another speaker invited to the class, Fannie Lou Hamer, an icon of the Civil Rights movement known as the woman who was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Fannie Lou first learned that she had the right to vote when she was forty-four years old. Volunteers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were visiting her Mississippi town and encouraging blacks to register for the vote. Fannie Lou and a few others volunteered to go to the courthouse and register, but when they arrived, they were arrested, jailed, and severely beaten. Even though she continued to receive death threats after she returned