Parks, Malone, and Tucker's Departure leaves us with the likes of Dr. Rice?

11.29.05 - Within the space of 12 October days we lost the woman who enabled Blacks to sit anywhere on public and private sector transportation, the woman who enabled doors to be open for Blacks at universities, and a woman who was both a Civil Rights and Women's Rights advocate, and at one time the 3rd most powerful individual an Pennsylvania (Secretary of the Commonwealth),and it seems we are left stuck with the most powerful woman in the world, as well as the most powerful Black woman in the world, who has made precious little effort to link herself to the cause of African Americans; Condoleezza Rice.

It has already been written as to the irony of those loses coinciding on the month that Dr. Rice is half of the subject matter of a new book once again pushing dialogue on a possible 2008 presidential campaign between her and Hillary Clinton, ("Condi vs. Hillary" by Dick Morris) and has been sighted in her old hometown in Birmingham AL paying homage on the anniversary of the four little girls who were blown up in that 16th Street Baptist Church forty-two years ago. Rice has been known to mention that one of the girls was a childhood friend of hers, and it's not for me or anyone to be concerned as to how often she mentions her or visits there, but given Rice' apparent lack of concern of the dirt-poor Black victims of the Gulf Coast storms and subsequent gulag, and her obvious detachment from any cause hinting civil rights, what thoughts linger in the mind of her childhood friend, Denise McNair, as she looks down on Condi?

You see, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, Rice is a direct beneficiary of the sweat of Rosa Parks, Vivian Malone-Jones and Cynthia Delores Tucker, and the blood of McNair and her three companions Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. What is Rice currently doing for the young Addie Maes, Cynthias, Caroles, and Denises today? For any answer to that, one need only to check her past record as a prominent member and decision maker within the Bush administration. Rice' statements about the University of Michigan Affirmative Action issue back in January of '03 was considered unusual for her since it was a non-foreign policy issue, yet there she was raising the ire of Blacks. Initially she was said to have persuaded Bush to publicly oppose U of M's Affirmative Action program, only to dig a deeper hole by stating that even though race can be used as one factor to achieving diversity (I take it other factors include pointed ears or three eyes), she really prefers race-neutral means for college admissions. Hey, errr, Condi, ma'am, when you say neutral, do you mean as in church-bombing neutral? This from a woman who admits to using Stanford's Affirmative Action program.

Rice seemed to use the Birmingham ceremony as a way to link the Civil Rights era struggles to something that is near and dear to her heart nowadays, helping foreign countries achieve "democracy." She brought Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain with her, and she invoked Dr. Martin Luther King's "I have a dream," speech. Doubtless those young ladies had dreams too, Spike Lee's HBO documentary "Four Little Girls" has an interview where Denise' parents took her Christmas shopping, and Denise wanted to stop and eat in a restaurant, and the pain they felt from telling her they couldn't get her the sandwich because she was Black. She reacted "very strange, very confused, as if a whole world of betrayal had fallen on her at that moment," said her father. Sadly, it did. 42 years, 12 days, the struggle continues.