Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter nineteen

We moved into one of the modest three-bedroom homes that were rented to young faculty at a highly subsidized rate for a maximum of two years. My parents gave me the master bedroom because it had its own bathroom and I was getting to the age where that kind of thing mattered.

One of our neighbors was an Israeli family. Benzion Netanyahu, a professor of Hebraic studies, taught in the Department of Religion, giving him and my father common interests. The Netanyahus had three sons, but only one was young enough to live at home. Their oldest son, Bibi, was in college, and their middle son was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Our families shared what I now understand to have been a Seder meal during the Passover holiday. Many years later, when Bibi Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel for the first time, my father reminded me of this example of far less than six degrees of separation. I still send greetings to Professor Netanyahu when I see his son.

Daddy started his job as assistant director for admissions and assistant dean of arts and sciences. Perhaps not coincidentally, his friend and mentor from Tuscaloosa, John Blackburn, had also moved to the University of Denver as vice chancellor.

It didn’t take long for Daddy to become a major figure at the university even though DU could not have been more different from Stillman. Denver University was private and very expensive. It was known as a bit of a party school populated by rich kids who either couldn’t get into Ivy League universities or wanted to ski—or both. Denver itself was more homogenous than almost any other big city in the country. I remember noticing that it was possible to spend an entire day on the city streets and not see another black person.

One of Daddy’s responsibilities was to increase the diversity of the student body, and he was given wide berth to do so. He traveled extensively to major cities, recruiting black students to the university, which wasn’t always easy. The mountain West could seem a bit foreign to kids who had grown up in places such as New York and Chicago. “The university should commit itself to the proposition that it is possible to have varying entrance standards, but only one exit or graduation standard,” he argued, speaking to the heart of the affirmative action debate.

After one year, my father increased the number of black students at DU to about one hundred in a population of seven thousand. The key, he believed, was adequate financial support. “What good does it do to locate a student, get him or her to apply for admission, and then have no funds available?” he asked. In search of a sustainable solution, Daddy created the Education Opportunity Program, which administered grants to students who were receiving financial aid but needed additional help covering basic college expenses, such as books and rent. The program was unique, not because of its intent but because of the funding source: parking meters on campus.

But simply diversifying the student body was not enough. Daddy went to Chancellor Mitchell and Dr. Blackburn and told them that he wanted to develop a curriculum that would ensure that all Denver students fully understood black America. Daddy was keenly aware that Denver, as a private school, had considerable latitude in developing a curriculum of the kind he envisioned. In addition to a course that he taught on the history of Africa until 1800, he wanted to offer a seminar as a way of launching an effort to create more minority courses and appoint black professors in regular departments. “It’s incomprehensible that out of all of the schools at DU you have one Afro-American administrator and two part-time people on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” he noted. Daddy hoped the seminar was just the beginning, and with its broad conception, the seminar encouraged students to combine academic coursework with public service and community involvement.

The seminar was set to launch in the winter quarter of 1970. Daddy got into the car one day, almost giddy about the advertising flyers that he had just had printed. The flyers showed an American flag—with black stars and red and black stripes. “This will make them a little angry,” he said. “That’s good for this place.”

The parade of speakers my father assembled for his seminar was extraordinary by any measure. Academics and educators, artists and activists, politicians and athletes all came together to provide their perspectives on the state of black America. There were also some civil rights leaders, such as Julian Bond, one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Fannie Lou Hamer, the woman who led the fight to seat an alternative delegation from Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention of 1968.

Sometimes the course resulted in direct action. For instance, during her speech to the class in 1970, Hamer mentioned that she had been unable to get federal examiners into Sunflower County, Mississippi, to ensure fair voting practices. Chancellor Mitchell, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, took up the matter with the Department of Justice, which finally sent federal examiners to Mississippi. Hamer’s lecture also inspired a large service project that included a citywide clothing drive on “Sunflower County Day,” championed by Spencer Haywood and Larry Jones of the NBA’s Denver Rockets. The entire Civil Rights Commission, headed by Father Theodore Hesburgh, the president of the University of Notre Dame, came for a class session the next year.

Occasionally, cultural figures such as the Ramsey Lewis Trio or the poet Useni Eugene Perkins were invited to perform. But most came from political backgrounds. A young Charlie Rangel, then a state representative in the New York Assembly, joined Ralph Metcalfe, U.S. congressman from Illinois and founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, in the lineup.

And many of the speakers were on the radical end of black politics, such as Dick Gregory and Louis Farrakhan. Lou House and Charles Hurst came down from Malcolm X College in Chicago, and the three track stars made famous by raising their black-gloved fists at the 1968 Olympics—Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Lee Evans—also spoke. One course session consisted of a telephone hookup to the hunger-striking black inmates of Attica prison in 1971. And, of course, Daddy invited his friend Stokely Carmichael to the podium several times.

The seminar had a pretty hard edge. This led my father, in a progress report on the class, to remind his unnamed critics in the university that the “deepest aims and hopes of the seminar are directed to the idea of reformation rather than revolution.” “The seminar is not a staging ground for violent revolution,” he emphasized. Daddy’s point was that if the seminar encouraged greater demands from the black community, it should not be discounted as academically invalid.

In truth, my father was fascinated with the radical side of black politics. I was never taught that Farrakhan was a traitor or that the Black Panthers were terrorists. They were to be taken seriously on their merits. Years later, when so much attention was paid to then-Senator Obama’s radical associations, I wondered what might have been made of the people who sat at our dinner table.

This was especially true of Stokely Carmichael, who came to Denver almost every year. Daddy even invited him in 1973 to speak at an adult education forum at the virtually all-white and quite wealthy Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, which we attended and where Daddy acted as a part-time assistant pastor. At the end of the session, Stokely, no longer in fatigues and now wearing tailored suits, received a standing ovation from the decidedly conservative membership. Afterward, my family and I were standing next to Stokely when we overheard a lady say, “Well, he wasn’t so bad.” Stokely turned to us without missing a beat: “What did she think I was going to do? Swing from the chandelier?”

Our association with Stokely Carmichael had an impact on me as well. When visiting the house he referred to me affectionately as his “petite soeur,” little sister. I remember sitting with him in the back seat of the car, singing along with the radio and witnessing his distress at lyrics that demeaned the black family. He hated the Temptations’ “Papa was a rolling stone—wherever he laid his hat was his home.” “Why do they send those messages to our kids?” Stokely asked.

Then, as I got older and my interest in Soviet politics grew, the two of us would debate his growing fascination with Leninism and socialism. He clearly thought that I was misguided in my rejection of communism and the teachings of Karl Marx. But Stokely Carmichael was a brilliant man and he made me hone my arguments. My father would beam as we argued, as he always enjoyed intellectual sparring and relished opportunities to “stir the pot.”

Over the years I’ve reflected on what attracted my conservative, Republican father to radicals such as Stokely Carmichael. When I asked, he said that he liked the contestation of ideas. It’s true that he loved to make people uncomfortable by testing the limits of their intellectual tolerance—whether with his congregation in Bible study or his students in the classroom.

But I’ve come to believe that there was more to it. Daddy would sometimes ridicule those who suggested that blacks find succor and support in a closer association with Africa. “America is our home,” he’d say. “Africa doesn’t belong to us or us to it.” And he’d sometimes say to my horror that the tragedy of slavery had given us the chance to live in the freest and most prosperous country on earth. He loved the United States of America and was vocal in his appreciation for the good fortune of being American. Yet he clearly admired the willingness of radicals to confront America’s racism with strength and pride rather than with humbleness and supplication.

Daddy was remarkably adept at navigating and charting a course for success in the white man’s world. But there was, I know, a deep reservoir of anger in him regarding the circumstances of being a black man in America. On occasion it surfaced—for instance, when Santa Claus was about to mistreat his daughter. Sometimes, after integration took hold, he and my uncle Alto would laugh at the “shuffling” white service people who were grateful for a tip from them. “He ought to scrape and bow for how he treated my daddy,” I overheard Alto say one day. My father roared his approval. But for the most part my father couldn’t afford to let the bitterness interfere or to give expression to it. Maybe giving voice to black radicals in the midst of his very white world helped him to square the circle.

So just one year into his tenure at Denver, Daddy’s career was flourishing, and his class was drawing crowds. I too was doing considerably better at St. Mary’s, making new friends there. I won the state championship in Greek and Roman history, finding a new passion. Well, actually it was only a competition among parochial schools, so there weren’t that many contestants. Nonetheless, my parents were very proud.

There was one unpleasant incident at St. Mary’s, which did cause my parents to question their decision to send me there. After doing poorly on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (I wasn’t then and am not now good at standardized tests), the guidance counselor called me in to review the results. “You didn’t do very well,” she said, ignoring the fact that I was two years younger than my schoolmates. “Perhaps you should consider junior college.” I just laughed at her, thanked her for her advice, and left. But when I went home and told my parents, they were not amused. They wanted to go to the school and confront her. I begged them not to, and I prevailed. I have told that story many times since, particularly when I was provost at Stanford, for several reasons. First, my own experience has led me to be rather suspicious of the predictive power of standardized tests. Second, I realize how lucky I was that my own sense of self—developed through years of parental affirmation—shielded me at that moment from self-doubt. I have always worried that there are many young people, particularly minorities, who might internalize negative messages like that and simply give up.

On balance, though, I loved my life in Denver. I kept the same rigorous schedule of piano and skating that I’d established the year before. I made rapid progress in piano in particular, competing in statewide and regional competitions. My first major competition was something of a disaster, though. Playing a Mozart piano sonata from memory, I lost my place a few minutes into the piece and wound up at the end before I’d played the middle. I was devastated—it was the first time I’d really bombed playing the piano. My parents tried to be supportive and kept talking about how good I’d sounded. I learned at that moment that some failures are best absorbed alone. I thanked them for their concern and spent the night replaying the disaster over and over. I knew that I hadn’t really been prepared for the competition. Perhaps because playing the piano is both a physical and mental challenge, it’s not possible to “cram” for a performance in the same way one can for an exam. In other words, practicing eight hours one day will not produce the same result as practicing one hour a day for eight days. I’d left my preparation to the last minute, and it showed.

A couple of days later I asked my piano teacher when the next competition would take place. It would be the Young Artists regional competition in the winter. I entered immediately. When my parents asked if it would help to practice on a grand piano, I spent weeks visiting piano stores trying to choose the right one to rent. All that preparation helped, and when I won the competition, my parents bought the piano. I learned later that they had to take out a $13,000 loan in order to do so. To this day, I still own and play that Chickering grand.

But while Daddy and I were doing very well, Mother was having a much more difficult time adjusting to Denver. She was unable to find a job right away, and for the first time I realized that my mother’s sense of self was tied to her identity as a teacher. She really missed her family, particularly her mother, and we didn’t have the money for frequent visits to Birmingham. To fill her days, Mother tried to throw herself into homemaking—even learning to make homemade bread, of all things. She made bread every week whether we ate it or not. At the age of fourteen I could see in my mother what it meant to make yourself content and happy, even if you were not fulfilled.

Mother also disliked the West’s informality. One night shortly after moving we were invited to a cocktail party at the university. My mother dressed as she would have in Alabama, in semiformal attire. When we got there everyone was in pantsuits (polyester was the dominant fabric). Mother was clearly embarrassed, but when we got in the car she said, “Condoleezza, if you are overdressed, it is a comment on them. If you are underdressed, it is a comment on you.” That statement has stayed with me over the years, and I have always dressed accordingly. But it said volumes about my mother and the importance she placed on social graces and nice clothes.

Despite this culture clash, the Rice family did settle into a rather comfortable life. Ice hockey became as important in our lives as football had been. The University of Denver had no football team, but it did have a tradition of championship hockey teams. We’d attended the games the year before, but now we purchased season tickets. Daddy became a member of the faculty athletic committee, which got us very good seats and a chance to get to know the hockey players. My parents liked the young men, most of whom were from western Canada, and treated them like surrogate sons, inviting them to dinner on many occasions. This was great for me since for the first time I was starting to react favorably to these creatures called boys.