There is argument about whether the intensity of segregation in Birmingham created a countervailing, equally pressured, protective society in which intellect and ideas could best flourish. The answer is “not everywhere”, but arguably that was so in the Rice household. Was their Westminster Presbyterian community even like some of the Christian groups which grew so indestructible under Communism? Some people think it was exactly that.
Odessa Woolfolk is one of the most respected local leaders. She shared Condoleezza Rice’s piano teacher and believes that music itself was an important escape then into another world. She worked with John Rice (“he was absolutely doting, talked about her all the time”), and admired greatly his belief in the power of scholarship to raise minds above the immediate and mundane. The future neo-Conservative, she thinks, was perfectly trained to understand any idea or concept – “but without perhaps the grounding in real things that makes for the very best judgment”.
Last October, the Secretary of State, “in a train of limousines and SUVs like you’ve never seen”, returned to see her old home for herself. She met her first school principal, Parnell Jones, now 89 and still living in the same Titusville house among cream china elephants and copies of Condi-lifestyle magazines. From his armchair, he looked back wistfully to the days when his children were well-motivated and well-behaved – particularly the pianist with pig-tails and curly handwriting whom “I made my little office girl”.
On the same trip, the line of State Department cars also filled their boss’s former playground in the heavy-bricked Westminster Church. There, she saw her old family pictures, still on the wall, and the newer razor wire that now protects her first bedroom window from drug addicts. And she met her old Honeysuckle Circle playmates, Carol Smitherman and Celeste King, with some of the mink-coated bible students whom she still calls “my Westminster family”. Smitherman and King have their own different reasons for anxiety about the changes since the days of their legally segregated youth. City Council President Smitherman, who recalls the evenings when “stickball had to wait for Condoleezza’s Beethoven to end”, must deal daily with crime, crack and hatred of white people in the area which once prided itself on the absence of all three.
Mrs King teaches at the school behind the church and keeps a picture of herself (“in scruffy trousers”) and her pig-tailed friend (“she always wore neat skirts”) at the blacks-only Star bowling alley in 1961. John Rice, watchfully keeping the score at the back of the picture, “evangelised” the then Celeste Mitchell as a child from the concrete-floored apartments outside Rice’s bedroom window: “It would be a foolish man who’d try that in those places at night now.”
At her classroom desk, she recalls how “a girl of huge talents” was guarded from the harshest realities and learnt “to see everything and do everything a bit different”. In every succeeding generation of black children she sees less of the Westminster spirit of that time: “Lesser engagement with broad issues, a lesser preparedness to work and a greater preparedness to blame their failures on white people.”
Also on that October homecoming journey last year was a new Westminster friend of Secretary Rice – British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when the White House stood accused of neglecting blacks at home as well as being friendless abroad, both host and guest had the job of reassuring Southern voters. To the surprise of some of her old friends, the Secretary of State had begun to use the language of Birmingham 1963 to explain Iraq 2003. Let no one have the condescension to tell her, she said, that the Iraqi people didn’t want freedom or weren’t ready for it. That’s what they had once said about the blacks of Alabama.
The feisty Deborah Carson, in fake leopard-skin hat (no Westminster mink for her) and brightly polished red nails, believes this to be a misleading analogy – and doubtless has the friendship and the fearlessness to say so. Odessa Woolfolk has her doubts, too. But it takes a brave critic in America to come out and challenge their Secretary of State openly on that argument.
Condoleezza Rice carries moral authority of a very special kind. Her arguments – as well as her triumphant return last October (more prodigious than prodigal) – have left behind a fierce battle of ideas in Birmingham. Should black leaders in her home town be frustrated that their city’s most powerful child is a Bush Republican, from a local background outside their revered civil rights movement? Or should their frustrations be of a wholly different sort – their own failure to fight the community’s battles now in ways which could produce either a future radical Fred Shuttlesworth or a future conservative Condoleezza Rice?
It is impossible to exaggerate the sweetness of the picture of Titusville in the segregation era which almost all its survivors keep in their minds. Celeste King, sitting at her desk in the sixth-grade class at Booker T. Washington School, recalls the churches where “every child had a hundred parents who would watch us as we worked and played”. John Rice, who preached with his wife at the organ on one side and his daughter at the piano on the other, seems to have been equally revered for his position as pastor, as sports teacher, as school counsellor – as well as his tolerance of home music. “He taught that everything we did had to be the best, twice as good as the next person, three times as good to be sure,” recalls Carol Smitherman from the front seat of her Mercedes as she takes her own Bible-bearing children back home from the same church.
Mrs Smitherman calls herself neither a Republican nor a Democrat but a “Christocrat” and has just told the Westminster family that “every time Condoleezza gets on a plane she has you with her”. The council leader lauds from the pulpit their shared values, their help in her council election campaign (“too often a prophet is not loved in her own country”), their ability to “circle the wagon” in each other’s defence, their intolerance of sexual indiscipline (“nobody in this church has been in anyone’s divorce court”) and their strong family lives (“I don’t care if I am the president of the City Council, I’ve still got to get in the kitchen and cook”).
Coming home to Titusville, she says, “is like coming back to my secret place, a place where we can pray for this black church and its special role now in the global community. “Thanks to Westminster,” she says, “I pray for guidance before all decisions I take – and I know that Condoleezza does, too. The Reverend Rice taught all of us that.”
