Whatever your politics, you cannot deny the fierceness of Ms. Condoleezza Rice. Not only does she know her college football and football in general, she started college at the University of Denver when she was merely 15 years old.
She was the first Black woman to be appointed national security adviser and U.S. Secretary of State. She is also the first woman and the first Black American to serve as provost of Stanford University.
Ms. Rice is an accomplished concert pianist. At the age of 15, she performed a Mozart composition with the Denver Symphony and while serving as Secretary of State, she played with a chamber music group. In addition, she performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has played with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Queen of Soul, Ms. Aretha Franklin.
Her favorite composer is Brahms, because as she puts it, his music is “passionate but not sentimental”. Furthermore, she has stated that her favorite band is Led Zeppelin.
Growing up in Jim Crow Alabama, Ms. Rice was a witness to the effects of racism in the south. She was eight when one of her school friends was killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963. Her comment on that:
I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed.
— Condoleezza Rice, Commencement 2004, Vanderbilt University, May 13, 2004
“The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations.
Those terrorists failed.”
Ms. Rice, you are one of my heroes.