When she completed her term as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice could have written a weighty tome on foreign policy. She could have written an insider's account of the Bush White House.

And she may get around to that.

But, first, she wanted to answer the question she's most often asked: How did a girl born to modest circumstances in the segregated Birmingham of the 1950s and 1960s end up a chief adviser to a Republican president of United States and the first black woman in history to serve as secretary of state?

Her response, Rice said in an interview this week, was always the same: "You'd have to know John and Angelena Rice to answer that question."

Her fuller answer to the question is provided in her new book: "Extraordinary, Ordinary People," a memoir that traces the story of her parents, their families and her life growing up in Birmingham.

On Friday, more than 300 people turned out at the Books-A-Million at Colonial Brookwood Village to see Rice and have copies of the book signed.

"She's been an inspiration to me," L'Tryce Slade, an entrepreneur and operator of

Slade Land Use, Environmental and Transportation Planning, said as she awaited Rice's arrival. "I see her as one of those women who has broken the glass ceiling like I'm trying to do."

Both sides of Rice's family converged in Birmingham in the first half of the 20th century.

Rice's maternal grandfather, Albert Ray, was a coal mining engineer. With his wife, Mattie, the Rays worked their way into the middle class, buying a home and land in Hooper City and sending their children to Miles College.

Rice's paternal grandfather, John Wesley Rice, grew up a sharecropper in Greene County and paid for his first year at Stillman College in cotton. At the end of that year, his cotton exhausted, he learned he could stay in school on scholarship if he was studying to be a Presbyterian minister.

He went on to found churches in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Alongside his churches, he always founded private schools, because he was dissatisfied with the paltry provisions for black public schools at the time.

Among the churches he founded was Birmingham's Westminster Presbyterian Church, and his son, John Wesley Rice Jr., took over as pastor of that church upon his father's death.

Outside the church, Rice's parents were educators. Her mother, Angelina, taught English at Fairfield Preparatory School. It was there she met her husband, who had been hired as the athletic director and assistant football coach. He was later a guidance counselor at Ullman High School.

In her account of growing up, Rice doesn't shy away from the dark side of segregated Birmingham. She recounts memories ranging from minor indignities faced by her parents at retail stores to bombings in her Titusville neighborhood and visions of her father sitting all night on the porch with a gun in his lap guarding the house.



Homegrown talent

But she also recounts the tremendous spring of talent that emerged from those segregated communities. Her mother remembers having Willie Mays as a student. Colin Powell's wife, Alma Johnson Powell, was the daughter of R.C. Johnson, the revered principal of Parker High School.

Among the young people Rice's father encouraged to further their education were Freeman Hrabowski II, who lived down the street from the Rices, and went on to be president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Sheryl McCarthy, an award-winning journalist at Newsday and New York Daily News and a national correspondent for ABC News, grew up in Rice's father's church. Birmingham City Councilwoman Carole Smitherman and Barbara Allen, who recently served as Birmingham school superintendent, came out of Titusville. Harold Jackson, who Rice's father helped propel from the Loveman Village housing project, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize at The Birmingham News and serve as editorial page editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I do think that Titusville was an extraordinary community," Rice said.

With the weight of segregation hanging over them, the children of that time and place were taught that they had to excel. "Everyone had to be twice as good," Rice said.

Born in 1954, Condoleezza was named by her mother from a variation on the Italian musical terms, "con dolce" or " con dolcezza," meaning "with sweetness." With self-deprecation, Rice describes herself in the book as a kindergartner who was chubby and had a big head, and she recounts being called "watermelon head" by a classmate.

Though she couldn't recall her exact comeback, she did shoot back, an early example of how she would grow into a person who would stand up for herself.

After graduating from kindergarten, she was too young to enter first grade. So her mother took the unusual step of home-schooling her daughter for a year. At the age of six, she was tested to qualify for second grade, scoring at the third-grade level in math and the fifth-grade level in reading. Throughout her life, Rice's parents provided for activities and learning beyond the standard fare, from foreign language to classical piano instruction.

While Rice moved with her mother and father to Denver in the late 1960s, she has maintained ties to Birmingham. Although Stanford, Calif., is her home and the base of her professional life, her roots run deep here.

"I get to Birmingham on holidays," she said in the interview. "This is home in that way."

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