On the morning of March 27, 2003, inside the presidential retreat at Camp David, Condoleezza Rice stared at a mud-stained newspaper headline which predicted – with excessive gloom as it seemed then – that the war in Iraq would last “months not weeks”. She had just helped to brief her boss, George W. Bush, for an awkward press conference. She was now sitting with the press herself, high-heeled despite the camp-site conditions, smart-suited in contrast to the casual journalists, and with an expression, as I noted in my diary at the time, as though she were “waiting for her exam results”.
When the President came to the podium, he struggled. Secretary of State Colin Powell winced. National Security Adviser Rice looked coldly at the mud on her shoes. Afterwards, I was able to ask George Bush how he thought the event had gone. “I had a whole lot of other material,” the President said, “about some of the things that Uday and Qusay Hussein do to their girlfriends, rape camps and torture, stuff that’ll have a lot of fathers out with shotguns when this is all over – but I didn’t want to say them in front of Condi.”
Not in front of Condi? What was all that about? Not in front of the official whose very job included deciding what the President saw and did not see from Iraq? Would the woman born amid the abusive racism of Birmingham, Alabama, really have been so sensitive to the dating rites of psychopathic Husseins? The President’s courtly protectiveness seemed slightly odd even at that time. But there were a lot of competing oddities then. Three years later, with Dr Rice now in Colin Powell’s old job, and with websites and hometown supporters wishing her in George Bush’s job too, there is a different focus on this very unusual woman, from her very unusual background in American culture.
This is a story of two small places, Titusville and Kelly Ingram Park, two different areas of Birmingham, Alabama, at two different times: 1954-69 and today. Titusville, when Condoleezza Rice was born there, was a protected enclave where ambitious black families could found businesses, follow academic studies, and try to shut out the racism around them. Kelly Ingram Park, on the other side of the city’s iron-foundry slums, was where the children of uneducated, poor black families risked their lives for their civil rights. That was then. Today, it is still a story of race and class – but also of war and foreign policy. It is a political narrative whose lines are both sugar-coated and sharply disputed. It raises issues which many Americans prefer not to confront, but which will face the next President, whether or not that person is the first single, black, female occupant of that office.
One thing is certain: the business of gently protecting Condoleezza – in the way that George Bush gently protects her now – was a project that began early. From the moment in 1954 that the daughter of John and Angelena Rice was brought back home from the Holy Family blacks-only hospital in the then most viciously segregated city in the South, extraordinary effort was deployed by those parents, the local Titusville community, and by Condoleezza herself (no use of “Condi” here) to ensure that she gained from the conditions around her – rather than be ground down by them.
This “spirit of Titusville” has already inspired a mass of motivational books and magazine articles. The famous daughter is shown as rising by willpower and hard work rather than through welfare and collective action. Many of the same stories appear in all.
So, read how Condoleezza Rice studied national news and French verbs rather than rushing out for street games. See how she was able – thanks to her determined mother – to avoid the blacks-only changing rooms at the dress shops. Remember how, when told that the Kiddieland amusement park was closed to coloureds, she did not experience what Martin Luther King called the “ominous clouds of inferiority in her little mental sky”. The Rices took their daughter to Brooklyn’s Coney Island park instead.
This was the time when Birmingham, the self-styled Magic City of iron and coal mines, had become Bombingham, the tragic city. It was not famous for Titusville, but for the Kelly Ingram Park scenes of child-marchers facing doberman police dogs, police fire-hoses playing on men and women who followed Dr King, and for the dynamiting of “uppity niggers” who dared to live outside their designated neighbourhoods. When a revolution is won, everyone claims to have fought at the barricades. But the Reverend John Rice, who died six years ago having just heard that his daughter was to be National Security Adviser, did not approve of marching.
I asked another pastor from that time, Fred Shuttlesworth, who spoke to John Rice most weeks and was one of the most radical of the Birmingham civil rights leaders, to explain. His answer, delivered on a pavement where the Ku Klux Klan had once “removed my black face” with knuckle dusters, was both sweet (“John said that the Lord had not called him for that”) and harsh (“on any battlefield someone has to peel the potatoes”). The political rise of Condoleezza Rice – and the social and economic decline in the place where she was born – has revived old arguments.
A sense of Angelena Rice’s approach (she died of breast cancer in 1985) can be gained from her brother Alto’s wife, the elegant, seemingly always dancing, 65-year-old Connie Ray. In her den at the Ramsay High School, she is immaculately dismissive of any politics beyond the politics of getting her pupils into Japanese exchange programmes and scholarship placements. That, and their old family Jaguar (pronounced with the longest imaginable drawling A) is what the Titusville culture means to her. “Difference is what we stood for, difference in decision-making (it was up to Condoleezza whether we should have goats’ milk to drink with our hot dogs), and daring to be the best. That child was our Pygmalion. She could be moulded. We were none of us marchers with the crowd.”
There were very few civil rights “actionists” (to use Shuttlesworth’s word) among the black families who lived near the Rices in the neat brick houses of Honeysuckle Circle, took French and piano lessons and tried to ensure that their children never saw a “whites only” drinking fountain or the “coloureds only” back of a bus. History teacher Odessa Woolfolk, who was born in Titusville and now presides over the Kelly Ingram Park Civil Rights Institute, remembers how some of the richer parents allowed their children to demonstrate – or couldn’t stop them. “But mostly it was the families who had nothing to lose who risked the hoses and the dogs and the uncertain fate inside the gaols.”
To Condoleezza Rice, the white supremacy of the South was inevitably going to fall – and the job of the future black leadership then was to study for the open society that would follow. Those of her neighbours who did fight the fight in 1963, like 62-year-old aircraft technician John Jeffries, beg to disagree, albeit with a hushed finger to his lips within the church walls, once the Secretary of State’s first bedroom. “All that they cared about was the great J.O.B. Their only word was the word from their sponsors.” Inevitably there is speculation about what impact the Titusville past may have had on the White House present. Successful blacks from these modest rows of brick and porch have tended to become Democrats with domestic concerns, not neo-con Republicans with a programme to change the ideology of the Middle East.
Condoleezza Rice’s good friend, then and now, Deborah Carson, remembers her own life at that time, “without non-stop books and piano” as less peculiarly intense. “I was allowed to let everything hang out more,” she says. She has her son on her knee in the childhood home to which she has just returned after a career in California, including campaign duties for Bill Clinton.
