it's long, but it's in the same neighborhood as the paraphrased assertions from the article
"Condoleezza Rice, named by her mother after the Italian musical notation con dolcezza, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954—just six months after Brown v. Board of Education. Her childhood took place during one of the great social upheavals of American history. Rice was an eight-year-old in Birmingham in 1963, when it was the main civil-rights battlefield, and she knew two of the four girls who were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in the late summer of that year. But Rice dislikes any attempt to shoehorn her into the prevailing white-liberal story line about civil rights. Some black people in the Jim Crow South might have been, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it in his "I Have a Dream" speech, "sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression" until the combination of their mass-protest movement at home and the passage of federal legislation in Washington freed them to enter the mainstream American world of justice and opportunity—but not the Rices. "We don't all have a deprivation narrative," one of her friends says tartly. The matter of Rice and race is complicated, but any exploration of it has to begin with her insistence that her family was proud, accomplished, self-reliant, and not in need of anybody's help, thank you.
It's true that Rice lived in a subculture that is now the object of great nostalgia in black America, and that white America has never fully acknowledged—the stable, churchgoing, family-oriented, improving Southern middle class of pre-civil-rights days, substantially employed in segregated schools, often living in close proximity to the poor. They were "very accomplished professional people who expected nothing less from their children," says Colin Powell, who married into the Birmingham world where Rice was reared. They were taught about segregation, "That's just the way it is, and don't let it be a problem. . . . We will go to extreme lengths to make sure that you get the same kind of cultural influences in your life that other children get." Birmingham had one notably rich black family, the Gastons, who were in the insurance business. Occupying the next rung down was Alma Powell's family—her father and her uncle were the principals of two black high schools in town. The Rices were another rung down. Rice's father, John Wesley Rice, Jr., worked for Alma Powell's uncle as a high-school guidance counsellor, and was an ordained minister who preached on weekends; Rice's mother, Angelena, was a teacher. The Rices' world in Birmingham was hardly a seedbed of the civil-rights movement—it seemed far too radical. Alma Powell, describing both her family and the Rices, told me, "They were not the generation that would get social change. They did not participate in sit-ins and marches. They were leery. In conversations with older people, you'd hear things like 'Oh, I don't know what's going to happen.' But there was no opposition to the movement—none of that." In the great intellectual divide of twentieth-century black America—between W. E. B. DuBois, the radical proponent of political change, and Booker T. Washington, the advocate of self-improvement and not confronting the Jim Crow system—the Rices sound as if they were more on the Washington side.
But to say that Rice is merely a typical product of her background would also be misleading. It may have been typical for children in her neighborhood to go to church and to be put on track for college and to take piano lessons—but not to perform in church and take lessons aimed at a concert-pianist career, in addition to flute lessons and ballet lessons and French lessons and violin lessons and skating lessons and skipping two grades in school and unusually close instruction in dress and grooming and manners. The Rices, in full partnership with their daughter, brought a special intensity to the rearing of Condoleezza Rice. She was an only child, born to older (for that time and place: both Rices were over thirty when she was born), well-established parents, with a large supporting cast of relatives in addition to the community itself, and a long-standing family tradition of ambition and education. Rice's view of herself is as a black patrician, whose family on both sides was unusually well educated, accomplished, and determined; she is partly descended from white plantation owners (again, on both sides), which is a complicated matter, but nothing to be ashamed of or angry about. (One black friend of Rice's jokingly described discussing with her whose white ancestors were the more aristocratic.) Rice mentioned to me one long-ago relative, a slave, who had taught herself to read; another who was a Methodist bishop; another who, though poor, spent ninety dollars during the Depression "on seven leather-bound and gold-embossed books . . . the works of Dumas, the works of Shakespeare"; and another who took a train to Pittsburgh in order to remove his son from a job in a steel mill (at a time in black America when such a job was highly valued) and reinsert him in college. About her black forebears who gave birth to partly white children, she said, "I do know that they were house slaves. They were in the house employ of the master. It's, frankly, why the whole Thomas Jefferson flap just is absurd. This was par for the course for the slave owners. And I think, for most black Americans, this to-ing and fro-ing—'Did he or did he not'—is just absurd." How does she feel about the slave owners from whom she is descended? "They are there," she said, and laughed.
In Rice, this unusual set of circumstances produced a sense of personal destiny. When her parents told her that she could be anything she wanted, they meant it more literally than parents usually do, and were saying it in the face of longer odds than children usually face. Rice often remarks that her parents told her she could become President—at a time when most black people in the South couldn't vote. In one version of the story, her father took eight-year-old Condi to Washington, and, as they stood in front of the White House, she said, "One day, I'll be in that house." And the chief means to the glorious end was sheer discipline and determination and self-belief. "The outer poise creates inner poise," one friend says. "It takes inside." Another friend says, "Condi believes in fate. People are where they are because they want to be."
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?021014fa_fact3
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