Condoleezza Rice’s Extraordinary, Ordinary People book in October 12, 2010
The first black woman to hold the office of the United States Secretary of State is set to release her first book – not about her years spent at the White House, but her growing-up years against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama.The memoir of Condoleezza Rice, the 66th U.S. Secretary of State, is titled Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, and will be released on Oct. 12, 2010. Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family, to be released by Crown Publishing Group, is the first in a two-book series. Delacorte Press, a division of Random House Children’s Books, plans to release an edition of the book for young-adult readers.
Condoleezza Rice’s second book will reportedly be reflections on her years in the White House as George W. Bush’s secretary of state and national security adviser.
Publisher Crown, an imprint of Random House, said Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family will take readers through Condoleezza Rice’s childhood from the “seemingly placid 1950s, when Birmingham blacks lived in a segregated parallel universe,” through “the shockingly violent ’60s when Rice saw girlhood friends lose their lives to the bloodshed.”
Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family is the story of Condoleezza Rice before she became a world leader. The book chronicles a girl trying to find her place in a hostile world and her relationship with her parents and community. Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family also records Rice’s twenties and thirties as she sets upon a path that later leads her to the White House.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family also talks about Condoleezza Rice’s role models, including her parents, John and Angelena.
In a statement, Condoleezza Rice, 55, said, “After I left Washington it seemed important to write about how my very special parents, my extended family and so many mentors shaped me for the challenges that lay ahead. I decided that was the story I wanted to tell first.”
She said Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family was her tribute to her parents who “passionately believed in the transformative power of education,” and “built a cocoon” for her with ballet, piano and French lessons in a segregated society.
She recalls a trip to Washington where she was eight years old. She says that her father used to say that she told him, outside the White House gates, that “I may be outside these gates now, but someday I will be inside, working.”
The former U.S. secretary of state says she doesn’t have any memory of making a statement like that but added that it was certainly something her father would have said.
In the 1950s, Birmingham was a place where blacks were expected to keep their head down and do what they were told. Racially motivated bombings were so common at that time that the city was dubbed “Bombingham.” The black middle class tried its best to insulate the children from the effects of racism but did not always succeed.
By 1963, when Condoleezza Rice was in the third grade she experienced racism first hand. The public safety commissioner of Birmingham decided against giving black citizens access to the city’s swimming pools, choosing to instead shut them down. Growing up in that divided city meant Rice never learned to swim till she turned 25.
Crown said Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family reveals her “upbringing in the context of the extraordinary efforts made by her parents and other people in the community to raise children against a backdrop of fading Jim Crow laws and emergent civil rights initiatives.”
The Jim Crow laws were enacted between 1876 and 1965 in the United States, mandating racial segregation in all public facilities, with a supposedly “separate but equal” status for blacks. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s created pressure to end such practices.
Condoleezza Rice was a professor of political science at Stanford University, where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999, before she joined the Bush administration. When George H.W. Bush was the president of the United States, Condoleezza served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor (through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the German reunification).
After leaving office, Condoleezza Rice returned to Stanford University in March 2009 as a professor of political science and as Thomas and Barbara Stephenson Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.