January 16, 2005|By Jonathan Tilove | Jonathan Tilove,SPECIAL TO THE SUN
In September 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the eulogy for three of the four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. What King could not know was that within earshot of the blast, just blocks away at her father's church, was another little black girl, a friend of the youngest victim, who 42 years later would be on the verge of becoming America's foremost diplomat.
This year, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, marking what would have been his 76th birthday, is tomorrow. On Tuesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee opens hearings on the nomination of Condoleezza Rice to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state.
It's a stunning juxtaposition that offers those who knew King, lived that history and ponder his legacy an opportunity to wonder: How might they explain Rice's rise to him? And what would he make of it?
She is, after all, the literal fulfillment of King's dream - a woman judged not by the color of her skin but by the content of her character. She is also living proof that King's eulogy was prescient, that "these children - unoffending, innocent and beautiful - did not die in vain."
"I would hold her up as a standard for all young black women," says the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the fearless civil rights leader who brought King to Birmingham. And yet Shuttlesworth believes the president Rice serves has got it wrong: "I just don't think bombing people makes them love you."
And there it is for many of King's disciples - profound pride at the scale of Rice's success, measured against the deepest doubts about the foreign policy of George W. Bush.
On Christmas night 1956, Shuttlesworth's church was blown up. He emerged, unhurt, from the rubble. This was the Birmingham - "Bombingham" - where Rice grew up. The dynamiting of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which took the life of Rice's friend Denise McNair, was only the most famous, the most heinous act of a very long reign of terror.
That a national security adviser and designated secretary of state in this age of global terror should be someone who survived what she has called "the home-grown terrorism of the 1960s" is striking and, in her view, fitting.
As she told the National Association of Black Journalists two summers ago, those who believe the Iraqis are unready or uninterested in freedom are echoing the racist appraisal of blacks when she was growing up. "The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad," she said.
But for others, as Columbia University law professor Patricia Williams wrote in The Nation in December, it is unseemly to invoke the memory of the martyred girls in the name of policies that seem so at odds with the spirit of the movement for which they gave their lives.
"If it's nice to see a black face in high places," wrote Williams, who identified with Rice's exacting, black middle-class striving, "that pleasure is more than outweighed by Rice's deployment as spokeswoman for an unprecedented policy of pre-emptive war - the public face of an undisciplined, frightened, chaotically managed yet supposedly libratory force that thoughtlessly bombs mosques with unarmed civilians inside."
Still, she wrote, "Nobody `hates' Condoleezza Rice."
"One of the things I've thought about a lot is why I feel differently about her than I would about some black conservatives," says Clayborne Carson, the historian chosen by Coretta Scott King to direct the King Papers Project at Stanford University, where Rice served as provost before joining the Bush administration. "I think the heart of the difference is that she was always part of the black community."
But Roger Wilkins, who, as head of the Justice Department's Community Relations Service in 1968, was sent by President Johnson the day after King's assassination to talk to his widow, believes Rice owes a debt to King, one best paid to those he cared most about at his life's end - the poor. King, Wilkins believes, would want Rice to understand that "there's a lot more to being black in America than just succeeding."
In a profile that appeared in The Washington Post Magazine the Sunday before Sept. 11, 2001, Rice portrayed herself as the product of not so much the movement to end segregation as her family's ability to surmount it and prepare her, their only child, for the opportunities freedom would bring.
Her mother, Angelena, was a teacher. Her father, John Wesley Rice Jr., was a minister with his own church and a guidance counselor at Ullman High School. (When Rice was 11, her father became a college administrator and moved the family first to Tuscaloosa, Ala., and later to Denver.)
"She's a great American story about the power of education and the progress we've made," says Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
