Condi Rice's disdain for Civil Rights movement

Catholic New Times, Dec 18, 2005 by J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Eugene Robinson, a black reporter for the Washington Post, inter viewed U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice during her recent flight from Washington to Alabama.

Robinson's revealing observations about Rice and her family coincide, at least to a point, with what I have said several times on my radio show. However, I know more about the Rice's family relation to the civil rights movement and the black struggle than Robinson because I was in Birmingham during the tumultuous civil rights years.

Robinson wrote that the parents of Rice did their best to shelter their only daughter from Jim Crow racism. The truth is they did a lot more than shelter Rice. They misled her about the justice of the civil rights movement, misled her about the courage of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, misled her about the greatness of Rev. Martin Luther King and misled her about all the dedicated people risking their lives in the streets and jails in Birmingham.

Rice and most upper middle class blacks in Birmingham were misled in the 1960s about the black struggle and they were taught that the civil fights movement represented what black folks should not do.

Rice's father, a prominent pastor in Birmingham, looked down on Shuttlesworth and his small working-class congregation, and publicly called them "uneducated, misguided Negroes." But, now in 2005, a life-size statute of Shuttlesworth stands for all the ages in front of the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. Rev. Rice's monument is his daughter's high position in a Republican administration that has only two per cent support in black America. That must be poetic justice personified.

On the flight from Washington, Rice told Mr. Robinson, "I've always said about Birmingham, that because race was everything, race was nothing." So, 40 years after her father denounced our efforts, Rice reduces segregation, the movement, and all the deaths and sacrifices to one word, "nothing."

In a sense, she is in 2005 where her father was 40 years ago. I have a feeling she would spit on the grave of King and on all those brave souls whose life and death sacrifices put her where she is now.

Robinson pointed out that Rice showed no visible emotion when speaking about her friend Denise McNair, one of the four young girls murdered in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. Robinson said such an experience would have left a deep scar on him. I don't think it would have left a scar on him if he, like Rice, had been taught over and over not to identify with certain black people and certain black causes. Rice was taught serious piano lessons and ballet in the stifling, racially segregated Birmingham as one way to be identified above the uncouth black masses demonstrating in the streets.

My wife speaks with disdain about white people, particularly Southern whites, who exalt blacks like Rice for downplaying the terrible toll of racism, past and present. Every ranking black official in the Bush Administration fits that mold and is a replica of Rice. Forty years ago, Bull Connor and George Wallace called Martin King and Shuttlesworth "irresponsible," and applauded Rice's father and others like him as "responsible, moderate Negro leaders." In truth, they were sell-outs who avoided attacking racial segregation and claimed "separate but equal" was sufficient.

If the plight of black people had been left to the tender mercy of the black leaders that Bull Connor and George Wallace called "moderates," we wouldn't be able to vote today or even rent a room at a racially segregated Holiday Inn.

If our fortunes in 2005 are left in care of the Rices of the world, our votes will matter less and less and we won't be able to afford a room at the local motel. Let there be no doubt that while white Alabama celebrates Rice, them is much reserve and distrust in black Alabama about the second black Secretary of State. Let there be no doubt why.

J.L. Chestnut, Jr. is a civil rights attorney in Selma, Alabama where he has been practising law since 1958.