He used to sit on the front porch with a gun, and helped organize bands of armed black men to patrol the streets of Titusville. He believed in meeting violence with violence. But back in Rice’s childhood, when the middle-class black neighborhood of Titusville was under constant assault by the terrorist bombers of the Ku Klux Klan, her father refused to join King’s nonviolent activism. Today, of course, every schoolchild has heard of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail. Her father pastored a black Presbyterian church in Birmingham, Alabama, which was, Rice reminds us twice, the most segregated city in America in the 1950s and early 1960s, the period in which she came of age. Her father, she says, “admired the willingness of radicals to confront America’s racism with strength and pride rather than with humbleness of supplication.” Rice herself offers a quite different explanation. She is reflecting on why her “conservative, Republican father” was on such good terms with “radicals such as Stokely Carmichael.” The answer the Reverend John Rice gave his daughter was that he loved the battle of ideas. Midway through Condoleezza Rice’s briskly written new memoir, Extraordinary, Ordinary People, comes a scene that captures the central contradiction of her life, and of her career.
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