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to her students,” said Betty. “She is a woman whose total career deserves nothing but the highest respect. She was in the South creating curriculum for black schools when it was not fashionable to do so.”
    When John and Angelena met, they discovered they shared a deep faith, a love for teaching, and a commitment to their own professional development. They both had aspirations for graduate school and for helping the youth of Titusville, and they both wanted to have a family. They were married in the early 1950s. Angelena has been described as a petite, light-skinned beauty who was nearly inseparable from her sister, Mattie (named after her mother). Friends called them the twins because they dressed alike and did everything together. “Angelena was very beautiful, very elegant,” said her sister-in-law, Connie Ray, and Condi has said that her mother always dressed beautifully.
    John and Angelena’s marriage brought together two family lineages that believed strongly in religion and achievement through education. Condi, described by one political journal as “the very picture of American over-achievement,” recognizes that she is the product of a family legacy that has always made education a priority. With three generations of college-educated family members, including preachers, teachers, and lawyers, the bar has always been set high. “So I should have turned out the way I did,” she told the Financial Times .
    “I don’t know too many American families, period, who can claim that not only are their parents college-educated, but their grandparents are college-educated and all their cousins and aunts and uncles are college-educated,” said Coit Blacker, a Stanford professor and friend of Condi. Upon hearing that Condi grew up in Birmingham, many assume that her childhood was deprived and underprivileged and that she did not see the light of opportunity until the Civil Rights movement began to bear fruit. But that is not Condi’s story. As she has often repeated, it is not a matter of America’s civil rights struggle but of her own family legacy.
    With the birth of Condi, John and Angelena funneled all the family support, strength, pride, faith in God, and sense of responsibility that had shaped their lives into their child. “They wanted the world,” said Connie Rice. “They wanted Rice to be free of any kind of shackles, mentally or physically, and they wanted her to own the world. And to give a child that kind of entitlement, you have to love her to death and make her believe that she can fly.”

THREE

    Twice as Good
“My parents had me absolutely convinced that . . . you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth’s but you can be president of the United States.”
    —Condoleezza Rice
     
     
     
    CONDI was born on a Sunday morning while her father was leading the eleven o’clock service at Westminster, a fitting time for a child of deeply religious parents to enter the world. The congregation often glanced over at the empty organ bench that morning, wondering how Angelena was doing and offering silent prayers that all would go well. They knew that Reverend Rice wanted a son—a football-, baseball-, and basketball-playing boy with whom he could share all the joys of sports. But if it was a girl, that would be wonderful, too—whatever the Lord delivered. On November 14, 1954, Angelena gave birth to a girl, and she named her Condoleezza. John simply named her his “Little Star,” and he continued to call her that for the rest of his life.
    John Rice preached at Westminster Presbyterian for eleven years, making the church Condi’s second home. When she was born, the Rices still lived in the pastor’s quarters, a set of rooms in the church building. Later, the church built a parsonage about eight blocks south at 929 Center Way, and the Rices moved in. The small, brick house sat on the corner of a brand-new, tidy block in a newly developed section of Titusville, one of Birmingham’s black