Oh, how I missed them. At the inauguration in 2001, I ached to have my parents sitting on the Mall watching George W. Bush take the oath of office, ushering me into the White House as well. When I landed in Moscow aboard a plane that simply said “The United States of America,” I wanted to send them the photograph. Visiting the Holy Land, I thought of how much my father would have relished walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Sitting in the Presidential Box at the Kennedy Center, I thought that my mother would have loved to see Aïda there and that my father would have hated it but gone along “for Ann’s sake.” And, of course, in 2010 I wanted my father to know that the New Orleans Saints had won the Super Bowl. He would have loved that!
But often it has been their presence, not their absence, that I’ve experienced. I could almost see John and Angelena Rice at the door of my West Wing office, as national security advisor, and hovering over me as I flew into a combat zone in Baghdad or Kabul as secretary of state. “You are well prepared for whatever is ahead of you,” I could hear them say. “Now don’t forget that you are God’s child and He will keep you in His care.” They remain by my side. And I feel today, as before, the overwhelming and unconditional love of the extraordinary, ordinary parents that I was so blessed to have.
chronology of events
1863 January 1: President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in Confederate states but leaving slavery intact in the North. It nevertheless makes the abolition of slavery a central objective of the Union forces in the Civil War.
1865–1877 The end of the Civil War marks the beginning of the Reconstruction era, a period during which the government tries to solve social, economic, and political problems brought about by the reunification of the Northern and Southern states.
1865 The United States ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which bans slavery and involuntary servitude.
1866 The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Tennessee by Confederate veterans of the Civil War.
1868 The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution grants civil and legal rights to all citizens of the United States and prevents those rights from being abridged or denied by any state.
1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi is elected the first black U.S. senator.
1870 The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution gives African American men the right to vote by banning restrictions based on race or “previous condition of servitude”; women still cannot vote.
1870 Many Southern states begin passing so-called Jim Crow laws—laws that segregate public facilities, forbid marriage between races, and make voting almost impossible for people of color. Jim Crow was a stereotypical character in racist minstrel shows popular in the period.
1883 The U.S. Supreme Court declares the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The act had deemed discrimination in many public places illegal.
1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded.
1920 The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution gives women the right to vote.
1954 In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.
1954 November 14: Condoleezza Rice is born in Birmingham, Alabama.
1955 In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus, where black people were forced to sit. The yearlong boycott of the city’s buses (led by Martin Luther King Jr.) ends when the U.S. Supreme Court declares Montgomery’s segregated transportation system unconstitutional.
1957 Fred Shuttlesworth, Charles K. Steele, Martin Luther King Jr., and many other civil rights leaders establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to end segregation through nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.
1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect black students after the state militia prevents them from entering a public high school. The governor is forced to comply with U.S. desegregation laws.
1960 John F. Kennedy is elected the thirty-fifth president of the United States.
1962 Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor closes public recreational facilities to avoid integration.
1962 John Glenn becomes the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.
1963 April 16: Martin Luther King Jr. is jailed during civil rights protests in Birmingham. During his imprisonment, he writes his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” urging eight fellow clergymen to support the cause of desegregation.
1963 May 2: Hundreds of students participate in the Children’s Crusade for civil rights in Birmingham.
1963 August 28: A crowd of 250,000 attends the March on Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
1963 September 15: Four young girls are killed and more than twenty people are injured when the predominantly black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed. In the aftermath of protests later that day, sixteen-year-old Johnny Robinson is shot in the back by police, and thirteen-year-old Virgil Wade is shot by a group of teenagers while riding his bike. Both teenagers are black.
1963 November 22: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
1963 November 22: Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.
1964 July 2: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin.
1965 Congress passes the Voting Rights Act; states can no longer restrict voter eligibility by requiring literacy tests or poll taxes, and federal oversight of elections is broadened.
1966 The Rice family moves to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
1968 April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis. Riots break out in cities across the country.
1968 June 5: Robert “Bobby” Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles.
1968 August 20: Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia.
1968 August 26–29: At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War turn bloody when crowds clash with police.
1968 The Rice family moves to Denver.
1974 August 9: Richard Nixon resigns as thirty-seventh president of the United States after attempting to cover up his role in break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex.
1974 Condoleezza Rice begins graduate school at the University of Notre Dame.
1976 James Earl “Jimmy” Carter is elected the thirty-ninth president of the United States.
1980 The United States and approximately sixty other countries boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.