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In spending so much time around her parents, Rice developed a remarkable maturity. When John Rice received a scholarship for a summer program at New York University, officials told him children could not stay in dorms. "My sister got on the phone and told them Condi was a child but she was not really a child," McPhatter says. "She said that she was very calm and acted just like an adult, and if Condi couldn't go, John wasn't coming either." Condi went along. "She was a perfect little lady and no one even realized she was there."

It might have been an idyllic youth had Birmingham not been a hotbed of racial violence. Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, inflamed racist sentiment and zealously enforced Jim Crow laws, keeping protesting blacks at bay with police dogs and fire hoses.

On September 15, 1963, a Sunday morning, Condi was standing inside her father's church when she felt the floor shake. A bomb had exploded two blocks away at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. One was Rice's schoolmate. That blast, rather than derailing the civil rights movement, energized the crusade to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Rice would later say the memory of "home-grown terrorism" from 1960s Birmingham flooded back into her mind after the 9/11 attacks. These early childhood memories have become a cornerstone in Rice's political convictions about the importance of human dignity and individual liberty for all people.

Like other middle-class black parents in Birmingham, the Rices were determined that their daughter would overcome racism through hard work, personal achievement, and a God-given sense of self-worth. "My parents had me absolutely convinced that … you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth's but you can be President of the United States," Rice told Newsweek. For Condi this meant being twice as good as whites in order to gain equal footing.

Banned from public restaurants, pools, and the local amusement park, Kiddieland, Birmingham's black youths had limited entertainment outlets. Pastor Rice created a youth fellowship organization.

"It was not just an adjunct to our spiritual lives, but also the center of our social lives," says Mary Kate Bush, president of Bush International, a global finance advisory company, who participated in the fellowship's Bible studies, dances, and cultural field trips. "[Condoleezza] was frequently there with us, being looked after by her father while he was running the youth fellowship."

"Daddy Rice"—as he came to be known by many of Condi's friends—was also a man of intense personal magnetism and confidence. Bush says he "exuded power" and possessed a gentleness that made him "totally approachable and warm." Those whose lives he touched credit him for their success. To John Rice, God and education were the keys to overcoming obstacles, and he made sure all of his "kids" got plenty of both.

"Our world was completely black," says Freeman A. Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Hrabowski attended Ullman High in Birmingham, where Pastor Rice also served as a guidance counselor. "The challenge was, when we moved beyond that world, we were going to be told we're second class. Rev. Rice was there preparing us for that. He was telling us we're children of God. How could we be second class? What he was doing was teaching us to live examined lives. He was pushing us to examine everything we did and how we did it."

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September 2003, Vol. 47, No. 9