Read Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story for Free Online

came,” said Condi, “they had been so frugal that they bought their home outright with money saved in a mattress.”
    Condi’s maternal grandparents shielded their children from Jim Crow statutes that materialized in greater Birmingham in everything from “colored” latrines and water fountains to city buses. One of the Ray children, Alto (Condi’s uncle), recalled that his father would ask him and his siblings to wait until they got home to go to the bathroom or get a drink rather than use one of the segregated public services. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I never got on a bus, a segregated bus, in my life.”
    Alabama was particularly detailed in its Black Codes, the state and city statutes that defined segregation in the Jim Crow era. (The term Jim Crow was derived from a character in blackface minstrel shows; a character originated by a white actor named, ironically, Thomas “Daddy” Rice.) Jim Crow was not only a system of legal statutes but a way of life that encompassed an unwritten standard of behavior between blacks and whites. These standards were based on a belief that blacks were intellectually and culturally inferior to whites, a conviction that pervaded Southern society and was preached from church pulpits to university classrooms. Jim Crow included a host of social taboos: a black man could not offer his hand to shake hands with a white man; he could not offer his hand to a white woman or he risked being accused of rape; if whites and blacks ate together, the whites would be served first; black couples could not kiss or show affection for each other in public; white drivers always had the right-of-way at intersections; whites did not address blacks with the titles Mr., Mrs., or Miss, but called them by their first names—conversely, blacks had to use such courtesy names when speaking to whites; a black person always rode in the back seat of a car driven by a white person (or in the back of a truck); and so on. These were the social norms. The Black Codes translated these norms into law, and Southern cities such as Birmingham were dotted with signs in all types of public places, from restaurants to train stations, that pointed out separate facilities for blacks and whites.
    By 1914, every Southern state had passed Black Codes. Those specific to Alabama included:
• Nurses: No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which Negro men are placed.
• Buses: All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for white and colored races.
• Railroads: The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.
• Restaurants: It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectively separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.
• Pool and Billiard Rooms: It shall be unlawful for a Negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.
• Toilet Facilities, Male: Every employer of white or Negro males shall provide for such white or Negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.
    Condi’s grandfather and grandmother Ray insulated their children as much as possible from these aspects of society. They forbade their children, for instance, from working as hired help in white homes to supplement the family income. Cooking and cleaning for white families was routine for other black Birmingham