An Extraordinary Woman

From a terrific interview of Condoleezza Rice about her memoir of growing up in Birmingham, Ala. in the 1950s and 60s conducted by Hugh Hewitt:

"HH: There’s a very sensitive and repeating discussion in Extraordinary Ordinary People about white kindness in a segregated society. You mention Dr. Carmichael, your mother’s doctor, and some of your dad’s friends in the education community, who would come through when he needed something. But it’s still, I mean, when you go to Burger Phillips, and you can’t try on a dress, I am amazed that it actually did not scar you. It does not appear to have scarred you.

CR: No, because my parents, and really, even their parents before them, and certainly the community that I grew up in, taught us that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but you could control how you reacted to your circumstances. And so this was not license to feel like a victim, or a license to complain. It was, if anything, a license to get highly educated and to overcome all of that. And nobody was going to be able to hold you down. I’ve often said that in this very segregated place, my parents and my community had me convinced that I might not be able to get a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, but I could be president of the United States if I wanted to be.

Read the whole thing.