Read Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story for Free Online Page A

children in the 1930s and 1940s, but not for the Rays. Condi and her cousins grew up hearing grandfather Ray’s watchwords, his guiding principle for them all: “Always remember you’re a Ray!”
    Reflecting upon both sets of grandparents, Condi remarked that they had freed themselves from the society around them. “They had broken the code,” she said. “They had figured out how to make an extraordinarily comfortable and fulfilling life despite the circumstances. They did not feel that they were captives.” Addressing young Birmingham readers in an editorial in the Birmingham News , she wrote, “If you take the time to learn from these ‘ordinary people’ you will reject the most pernicious idea of our time—that somehow life is harder for you and for me than it was for our forefathers. . . . Men and women who refused to be denied have changed their circumstances time and time again throughout history and almost magically—those personal triumphs have propelled their country forward.” Condi’s second cousin, Connie Rice, added, “Our grandfathers had this indomitable outlook. It went: Racism is the way of the world, but it’s got nothing to do with your mission, which is to be the best damned whatever-you’re-going-to-be in the world. Life was a regimen: Read a book a day. Religion, religion, religion.”
    One of Albert and Mattie Ray’s daughters, Angelena, was a serious piano student who went to college to obtain a degree in education. She then taught music and science at Fairfield Industrial High School in Fairfield, a predominately black, tidy southwest suburb of Birmingham set on a hill overlooking the steel mills.
    While teaching at Fairfield Industrial, Angelena met a young Presbyterian minister who was also teaching at the school to supplement his minister’s salary (as most ministers did in those days). John Wesley Rice was also the head coach of the basketball team and assistant coach of the football team. When he wasn’t at the church or Fairfield High, he was working as a guidance counselor at Ullman High School in downtown Birmingham.
    John was born in Baton Rouge on November 3, 1923, to John Wesley Rice and Theresa Hardnett Rice, and he and his sister, Angela Theresa, grew up attending the public schools in that city. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in his father’s alma mater, Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, but transferred to another Presbyterian-based black college Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina. This historic school was founded in 1867 by two Presbyterian ministers and began as a small high school and Bible institute. By the early 1920s it had grown into a four-year liberal arts college and seminary and was renamed after one of its benefactors.
    After receiving his bachelor’s degree at Smith, John spent two more years working on a master of divinity degree, which he completed in 1948 at age twenty-four. He led his first congregation in Baton Rouge before moving to Birmingham to take over his father’s ministry at Westminster Presbyterian Church in 1951. When he arrived, the church had completed its new, red brick building on South Sixth Avenue.
    John’s sister, Angela Theresa Rice Love (Condi’s aunt), left Louisiana to attend the University of Wisconsin, where she received a Ph.D. in English Literature. She specialized in Victorian literature and was a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she received the Outstanding Faculty Award in 1989. Her book, a study of Dickens entitled Charles Dickens and the Seven Deadly Sins , was published by Interstate Press in 1979. One of her colleagues, Professor Betty Richardson, recalled that before coming to Illinois, Theresa spent a great deal of time building the curriculums of black schools in the South—struggling to win budgets for programs and foregoing her own academic advancement in the process. “Dr. Love was absolutely committed to African-American studies and dedicated