In an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice shared her experiences growing up in Birmingham, Ala., during the height of the civil rights movement.
“Well growing up in Birmingham, which was clearly the most segregated big city in America and a place in 1962 and ‘63 would be called ‘Bombingham’ because it was so violent,” she told Rev. Sharpton. “It was like living in a parallel world. We didn’t interact with whites, I didn’t have white friends. But we did have in our little middle class neighborhood, families, parents, and teachers who cared about letting us see that there were no limits in our horizons.
She remembers vividly the day the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four young girls about her age.
“My dad’s church was only about two miles from 16th Street Baptist Church, and so it was like the ground shook,” she said. “And for kids in Birmingham my age, I was eight, it was–how could these people hate us so much?”
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was far from her only brush with violence.
“My father and his friends formed a brigade to keep the community safe. We lived in kind of cul-de-sac, and they would go to the head of each parts of the cul-de-sac, and they had their shifts—with their weapons out there to keep Night Riders out of the community—I don’t think they ever actually shot anybody, but they shot their guns in the air once in a while,” she explained.
“That was how they protected—the police couldn’t protect you. Coming home one day from my grandparents’ house, a bomb—we felt a bomb go off and heard an explosion, and my father put us back in the car and started to drive away, and my mother said, ‘Where are you going?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to go to the police.’ And she said, ‘They probably set the bomb—what do you mean you’re going to the police?’”
She also said that despite the violence and fear in their community, her parents also told her that she could accomplish anything.
“You were always aware that you couldn’t go to a movie theater, couldn’t go to a restaurant,” she said. “I have said sometimes, very often that my parents couldn’t take me to have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, but they had me absolutely convinced that I could be president of the United States if I wanted to be.”








