Condi Rice's Disdain for the Civil Rights Movement

[Quixote1818]

Mr. Eugene Robinson, a black reporter for the Washington Post, interviewed Secretary of State Condi Rice during her recent flight from Washington to Alabama, and wrote a newspaper column about the experience. Mr. Robinson's revealing observations about Ms. 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 Mr. Robinson because I was in Birmingham during the tumultuous civil rights years.

Mr. Robinson wrote that the parents of Ms. Rice did their best to shelter their only daughter from Jim Crow racism. The truth is they did a helluva lot more than shelter Ms. 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 King and misled her about all the dedicated people risking their lives in the streets and jails in Birmingham. Ms. 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 rights movement represented what black folks should not to do.

Ms. 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, in 2005, a life-size statute of Shuttlesworth stands majestically 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 2% support in black America. That is poetic justice personified.

On the flight from Washington, Ms. 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 us, Ms. Rice reduces segregation, the movement, 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.

More at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/chestnut11192005.html

[RufusEarl]

1. It's all in the eyes

Look at still photo's of Ms. Rice, it's scary. The eyes tell all, and she has eyes without soul.

[noonwitch]

2. Condi was friends with one of the girls killed in the church bombing

The bombing Spike Lee made "Four Little Girls", the HBO documentary, about. Don't watch it without lots of kleenex around.

A while back, I read an interview with her in which she discussed the fear that she grew up with because of it.

As a white person, I refuse to judge Ms. Rice on racial issues. I have no right to speak for what her experience has been. Perhaps her parents did shelter her-what parents wouldn't, in light of a bombing that killed children, children that she and her family knew? Isn't that a parent's logical response in the face of such events? They couldn't take that act of terrorism and it's effects on their child away.

I will criticize her policies and her stand on issues, not try to imply that she somehow has never experienced racism the way other black americans do. Whatever I may think of her politics, she is still an african-american woman who has been very successful in a white man's world. If nothing else, I give her credit for that.

[underpants]

3. Condi's dad was against the Civil Rights movement and MLK specifically

Thus giving him a permenant seat at the Republican table and setting that very table for his daughter's rise through the party.