Strong, Loving Family Encouraged Rice To Shine

This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Melissa Mitchell, Office Manager for the John Locke Foundation.

RALEIGH — I love to read, and I like nothing better than curling up with a good book. I always have a stack of unread books, and I often lament: So many books, and so little time. Recently, needing something to read, I headed to that stack and grabbed Condoleezza Rice’s book, A Memoir of Family: Extraordinary Ordinary People, which turned out to be a great choice. I have always admired her, and after reading the Author’s Note, I was hooked and could not put the book down.

Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Ala., in the heart of the Jim Crow South. At the time, Birmingham was the most segregated city in the United States. Having been raised in Pennsylvania, I knew that there was an ugly side to segregation. Like the rest of the U.S, we had segregation, but it was different. It was nothing like what the Rice family and other southern blacks endured.

In Pennsylvania many blacks lived in distinct areas, but they were able to go to any store or restaurant. There were no separate bathrooms or water fountains. So I was shocked when I read about what Condoleezza Rice had to endure as they lived and traveled in the South.

When they traveled to New York, her family had to take a picnic lunch because there were no restaurants where they could eat until they arrived in Washington, D.C. There were also no hotels. The “coloreds”-only gas-station restrooms were putrid, and Condoleezza’s mother did not like stopping there. They also needed to be out of the deep South before dark, so arriving in D.C., where there were restaurants, restrooms, and hotels, was a relief.

The book is a fascinating look at an educated middle-class family who produced this Secretary of State, which was only one of her accomplishments. In 1992, she became provost of Stanford University. It was a difficult time for the university, and she had to deal with a financial crisis and a campus damaged by the recent earthquake. She had to make difficult decisions, and one decision caused a group of students to stage a campus sit-in and student hunger strike. When the media asked her about the situation, she said that she was “sleeping and eating just fine, her decision stood, and they could stay out there until hell freezes over.”

Since leaving Washington, D.C., she has returned to Stanford, where she is a tenured professor. Her father instilled a love of sports, and she can be seen sitting on the sidelines at most Stanford athletic events.

But it was her extraordinary, ordinary parents who provided Rice with the education and skills she needed to succeed. As Rice points out, “I don’t think they ever read a book on parenting. They were just good at it — not perfect, but really good.” Just as I was starting to write about this book, The Wall Street Journal ran an article titled “Why Chinese mothers are superior.” I laughed as I read the article, thinking how differently Rice’s parents treated her. The women in the article would, no doubt, be appalled by the amount of TV Rice said she watched. In fact, the whole family watched TV together. Her parents even made a white insurance agent wait while the family participated in a family ritual of putting on Mickey Mouse ears and singing mouseketeer songs with their young daughter as she watched the Mickey Mouse Club.

Because she was an only child, Condoleezza’s father arranged for her to be with other children, not the no-play-date atmosphere of the Chinese mother. She was also included in important family discussions and decisions from a very young age. Rice is a concert pianist, but she was never forced to practice for hours.

Some will say that her parents were overindulgent and doted on their child. Rice’s parents sacrificed so she could have piano lesions and a good education. They provided her with a love of classical music, but they could not entice her to love reading. She says that she is a procrastinator and tells how her parents failed to cure this problem when they had a chance.

At times she was bratty, but she said her parents only ever spanked her one time.

Ironically, she points out some positive aspects of segregation. Rice notes that “there were few single parents, and black men were a dominant presence in the community.” There was also a network of extended family. She also says, “Because of segregation, black parents were able to, in large part, control the environment in which they raised their children.”

Rice also writes “churches provided the final pillar of support. There was no question as to where you should be on Sunday morning. There were no atheists and no agnostics in any middle-class community,” she states.

Certainly, she lived through a very dangerous time during the fight to end segregation, and the racism she experienced is heartbreaking, but she is not bitter, nor does she accept the victim mentality, which is a result of her father’s belief that becoming a victim allows others to control your life.

Rice’s father was a minister and an educator, and she says she still remembers many of his sermons. Her mother was a teacher, so it was natural for them to provide her with numerous opportunities. On the weekends, she was enrolled in French and typing lessons. Her parents thought she was a genius and at the age of six arranged for her to have an IQ test. When she scored “only” 136, they were disappointed and thought something was wrong with the test. When she explained to them that she had a difficult time with parts of the test, they realized that they had a child of normal intelligence.

The book is more than just a history of Rice’s family. It provides an in-depth look at the segregated South and her years in government, but the book ends at the beginning of the Bush presidency. She is writing a second book about those years. Rice provides insight into the first Bush presidency and the end of the Cold War. Many people do not realize how involved she was in government before she became part of the second Bush’s administration.

The Rices were not only a force in shaping their daughter. They worked tirelessly to help students in the black community — both during segregation and after it ended. They understood that education was the key to success. Rice’s father launched numerous programs to help poverty-stricken East Palo Alto, California. Condoleezza says of her father, “He was an education evangelist.”

I was intrigued by the key elements that allowed her family to succeed in an era when many black families did not. They instilled in her a love of God, family and country.

They did not cure her habit of procrastination, but they did instill a work ethic.

She had strong, but loving, parents. There was never any doubt that she was loved, and even as a young child she respected them and did not want to disappoint them.

I like books that provide information, and this book does. I also like to pick people’s brains and hear about their lives. I received an inside look at segregation and the Rice family’s fear and sadness when the church was bombed in Birmingham. As an only child, the loss of her mother to cancer and her father to heart disease illustrates her deep affection for her parents and her religious faith.

It was just a good book to curl up with on a cold winter day, and I’m looking forward to her book on the Bush years.