'Birmingham was not an easy place to grow up if you were black'

Morgan: What do you think your parents would have made of you? I mean the sad thing for you, I think, is not that you had this terrible, tough upbringing, you know, Birmingham in those days was an awful place for a young black girl to be brought up.

Rice: Well, I have to — first of all, Birmingham was not an easy place to grow up if you were black, but I was fortunate to live in a very loving family and community. We had our ballet lessons. We had our piano and French lessons. We really weren’t deprived much.

Morgan: One of your friends was killed in one of the more notorious incidents.

Rice: Yes. Denise Signeir. Yes.

Morgan: I mean, just — a bomb went off in a church and she died along with three others. I mean, these are appalling things that were going on.

Rice: Well, Birmingham became known as Bomb-ingham in those years, ‘62, ‘63. Bombs went off in communities including ours. Quite frequently. But again, I was lucky. I had parents who told me you might not be able to control your circumstances, but you can control your response to your circumstances.

Morgan: Your mother, it seemed to me had one view. Your father was a tough man who believed in fighting —

Rice: Yes.

Morgan: — physically, if need be against the tyranny of racism. So much so that he wouldn’t march with Martin Luther King.

Rice: Yes. Right.

Morgan: Because he said I don’t believe in peaceful protest. If someone comes after me, as a racist, I’m going to fight them.

Rice: That’s right. I remember very well my father and mother talking. I was a little girl. He said, you know, Angelena, they’re telling us we should go out there and be non-violent. But if somebody comes after me with a Billy club, you know, a police club, I’m going to try to kill them and my daughter’s going to be an orphan. So, I’m not going out there.

Morgan: Did he make you tough?

Rice: Well, certainly, I think I have part of my father’s personality. He was a loving person. His students from across his life remember him as the most caring professor and minister they ever had. But he was tough-minded and demanding. I think I’m a lot like that.

Morgan: What would he have made of what happened to you?

Rice: Well, he knew a little bit because he died in 2000. He died just before I left to become national security advisor. I don’t think he would have been terribly surprised because he thought that I was going to do something special. That was always what he said. My mother died considerably earlier. She died in 1985 and I was well on my way to being a Stanford professor, but I was not really yet involved in the political life.

Morgan: The passages in your book about your mother and her tragically early death, probably the most moving in the book, I think. What kind of woman was she?

Rice: My mom was a lady in the nicest sense of the term. She was a musician, believed in elegance, social graces.

Morgan: She — she got cancer and then she made a recovery from cancer.

Rice: She got cancer when I was only 15. It was quite an aggressive breast cancer at the time. But she survived it for 15 years. She showed tremendous courage because in those days, the treatment was pretty blunt. You simply lopped off the breast. You didn’t bother with reconstruction. But she never complained. She didn’t talk about her fears about the disease. It recurred 15 years later. And even though it was very tragic, I’ve always thanked God that I was 30, not 15 when I lost my mother.

Morgan: You must miss her terribly, though.

Rice: Oh, of course. Every day. But I’m a deeply religious person and I believe that spiritually, we are untied across the chasm of death. I say in the book, and I really mean that very often I feel their presence more than their absence. The wonderful thing about my parents is they were people who were bursting with pride when I did a bad, you know, tap dancing routine in my school. I never felt that achievement was, to them, a litmus test for unconditional love. But their conditional love led them to give me these extraordinary opportunities.

Morgan: You can tout everyone’s success to parents.

Rice: I think you’re very fortunate if you had great parents and — and if you didn’t, as many kids don’t, there has to be some adult who is going to advocate for that child. No — no child navigates this world alone.

(An excerpt from an interview of former US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice by Piers Morgan on CNN, January 2011)