Condoleezza Rice’s journey from the segregated South to the highest echelons of power exemplifies resilience, determination, and excellence. Take a glimpse into her engrossing life story.

Before even considering how high Condoleezza made it in the political sphere career, one is compelled to look at where Rice came from. Born in the deeply discriminating, deeply segregated deep-south, Alabama, she wasn’t supposed to get this far. She wasn’t supposed to even make it out alive.
As African-Americans, her family had to undergo the indignity and horror of segregation, and frequent attacks and harassment by the Ku Klux Klan. Her hometown was the setting for the 1963 Birmingham Bombing, where a church was blown-up by white supremacists, resulting in the deaths of 2 young black girls. But she rose above the prejudice. The discrimination and intimation fuelled her with a desire to show how good she could be. “If you were well-educated and you spoke well, then there was only so much ‘they’ could do to you. But even with a strong education, you had to be twice as good to be accepted,” Rice says. She was determined not to be a victim.
She studied hard, realising that dignity and education could never be stripped away. When Rice took over the State Department in 2005, it represented a huge merit of personal success and an historic benchmark too. The political landscape and scathing overseas perception of the USA meant that the situation was far from the American Dream, however her background prepared her for the adversity. The country needed a steady head and an assured leader as its 66th Secretary of State.
Condoleezza Rice was a lighthouse in the storm. She calmed a post 9/11, disillusioned populace, showing that the US was not in the business of deposing dictators and leaving behind a broken, battered society in the countries they had liberated, and instigated a policy of ‘Transformational Diplomacy’. She had witnessed the scars of real, persecuted, people since birth.
Her quasi-military, no-nonsense approach meant there were no dissenters and plenty of supporters for her in the political spectrum. She got the job done, and done well. What she achieved was impossible, incomprehensible in the climate in which she was raised: a black woman becoming the Provost of an Ivy League university, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. From the very beginning, Rice refused to accept what was ‘fated’ for her… which to us, is the true measure of her greatness.