Illustration by Steven Fromtling
The former secretary of state describes the world and family that made her who she is today. Excerpt from “Condoleezza Rice,” October 18, 2010. Condoleezza Rice Former
U.S. Secretary of State; Professor of Business and Political Science, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution; Author, Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family
in conversation with mary cranston Senior
Partner, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP
ORDINARY EXTRAORDINARY 16
THE COMMO N WE AL TH
decem be r 2010/Jan ua ry 2011
CRANSTON: Could you talk a little bit about your parents? They were really exceptional. RICE: They were, in many ways, quite ordinary people. My mother was a schoolteacher, first an English teacher. By the way, one of her early students was Willie Mays. Later, [she] was a science teacher. My father was a football coach when I was born, then later a high school guidance counselor, Presbyterian minister, and ultimately a university administrator. So in that sense, they were quite ordinary people, and I doubt that they ever made more than $60,000 between them. But what made them extraordinary was that, first of all, they were growing up themselves and ultimately raising a family in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, a quite extraordinary place. I’ve called Birmingham the most segregated big city in America, a place where you couldn’t go to a restaurant, where you couldn’t stay in a hotel, and yet, within this place with very limited horizons, they somehow had their little girl convinced that she might not be able to have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, but if she wanted to be president of the United States, that was perfectly fine and she was capable of doing it. In that sense, they were extraordinary. CRANSTON: In the book, you almost