Condoleezza Rice is a Stanford University professor and serves on the board of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. She has also served on numerous other boards, including the Carnegie Foundation, and while at Stanford Rice also founded the Center for New Generation, an after-school program created to raise the high school graduation numbers of California children.
She is also the first black female ever to serve as Secretary of State, but it was under George W. Bush, which is a problem for many liberals, especially liberal academics. Rice was recently invited to participate in a Civil Rights symposium at the University of Minnesota, but approximately 200 professors demanded that the school take back the invitation, claiming that Ms. Rice was unfit to partake in any Civil Rights discussion.
Ms. Rice was born in 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama, which in the early 1960s was ground zero for the violent white backlash against the Civil Rights movement. As a young girl she was subjected to many kinds of discrimination, including being denied service at restaurants, and she saw first-hand the violence perpetrated on African-Americans. In 1963 her schoolmate Denise McNair was killed in the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. What could she possibly contribute to a civil-rights discussion?
The same thing happened to her at Rutgers University, where her invitation to give the commencement address also sparked a mass protest among the Rutgers faculty, who questioned her ability to “provide moral authority and exemplary leadership.”
Born in the heart of Jim Crow, Alabama, to a high school teacher and guidance counselor, she graduated cum laude in political science from the University of Denver, earned a masters at the University of Notre Dame, and later reached one of the highest positions of leadership in the American government. What would Condi Rice know about moral authority and exemplary leadership?
By contrast, our first black Attorney General, Eric Holder, is held in esteem throughout academia, although not so much in Congress where he is currently in contempt of Congress, the first sitting Cabinet member in American history to have that distinction. The House voted to hold him in contempt after he refused to honor a subpoena of documents related to the “Fast and Furious” gun-running debacle in which a border security guard was killed by a gun sold to Mexican drug lords as part of Fast and Furious. At a recent congressional hearing Rep. Louie Gohmert reminded Holder of that contempt charge, to which Holder replied, contemptuously, “You don’t want to go there, buddy.”
Days later, Holder complained about the “unprecedented, unwarranted ugly and divisive adversity” he had been subjected to by the House committee. So far, no public complaints from Condi Rice.
