page_title: Condoleezza Rice
section_title: Racial discrimination
hierarchical_section_title: Condoleezza Rice / Racial discrimination
caption_attribution_description: English: White House signing of Bill for Rosa Parks statue at Statuary Hall. White house website description as follows: President George W. Bush is seen Thursday, Dec. 1. 2005 in the Eisenhower Executuive Office Building in Washington, as he signs H.R. 4145, to Direct the Joint Committee on the Library to Obtain a Statue of Rosa Parks, which will be placed in the US Capitol's National Statuary Hall. The President is joined by, from left to right, U.S. Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson, Mrs. Laura Bush, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss.
context_page_description: Condoleezza "Condi" Rice is an American diplomat, political scientist, civil servant, and professor who served as the 66th United States Secretary of State from 2005 to 2009 and as the 20th United States National Security Advisor from 2001 to 2005. A member of the Republican Party, Rice was the first female African-American Secretary of State and the first woman to serve as National Security Advisor.
  Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up while the South was racially segregated. She obtained her bachelor's degree from the University of Denver and her master's degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame. In 1981 she received a PhD from the School of International Studies at the University of Denver. She worked at the State Department under the Carter administration and served on the National Security Council as the Soviet and Eastern Europe Affairs Advisor to President George H. W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification from 1989 to 1991. Rice later pursued an academic fellowship at Stanford University, where she later served as provost from 1993 to 1999.
context_section_description: Rice experienced firsthand the injustices of Birmingham's discriminatory laws and attitudes. She was instructed to walk proudly in public and to use the facilities at home rather than subject herself to the indignity of "colored" facilities in town. As Rice recalls of her parents and their peers, "they refused to allow the limits and injustices of their time to limit our horizons."
  However, Rice recalls various times in which she suffered discrimination on account of her race, which included being relegated to a storage room at a department store instead of a regular dressing room, being barred from going to the circus or the local amusement park, being denied hotel rooms, and even being given bad food at restaurants. Also, while Rice was mostly kept by her parents from areas where she might face discrimination, she was very aware of the civil rights struggle and the problems of Jim Crow laws in Birmingham. A neighbor, Juliemma Smith, described how "[Condi] used to call me and say things like, 'Did you see what Bull Connor did today?' She was just a little girl and she did that all the time. I would have to read the newspaper thoroughly because I wouldn't know what she was going to talk about." Rice herself said of the segregation era: "Those terrible events burned into my consciousness. I missed many days at my segregated school because of the frequent bomb threats."
  During the violent days of the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend Rice armed himself and kept guard over the house while Condoleezza practiced the piano inside. According to J. L. Chestnut, Reverend Rice called local civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth and his followers "uneducated, misguided Negroes." Also, Reverend Rice instilled in his daughter and students that black people would have to prove themselves worthy of advancement, and would simply have to be "twice as good" to overcome injustices built into the system. Rice said "My parents were very strategic, 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."
  While the Rices supported the goals of the civil rights movement, they did not agree with the idea of putting their child in harm's way.
  Rice was eight when her schoolmate Denise McNair, aged 11, was murdered in the bombing of the primarily black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by white supremacists on September 15, 1963. Rice has commented upon that moment in her life:
  I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father's church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.
  Rice states that growing up during racial segregation taught her determination against adversity, and the need to be "twice as good" as non-minorities. Segregation also hardened her stance on the right to bear arms; Rice has said in interviews that if gun registration had been mandatory, her father's weapons would have been confiscated by Birmingham's segregationist director of public safety, Bull Connor, leaving them defenseless against Ku Klux Klan nightriders.
caption: President Bush signing bill for Rosa Parks statue at Statuary Hall, Washington, D.C.
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