By Chip Berlet
October 27th, 2004
When I hear Condoleeza Rice defending the war in Iraq I think of her father denouncing the war in Vietnam. Condi's dad was a Dean in the college of liberal arts at the University of Denver in the early 1970s when I was editor of the student newspaper, the 'Clarion'. His name was John Rice, but no student dared call him that. He was an imposing figure, and we all called him "Dean" Rice.
In her book 'Bushwomen', Laura Flanders traces how Condi Rice was recruited by right-wing Republicans. Flanders recounts how Ms. Rice, speaking at the GOP convention in Philadelphia, said that her father "was the first Republican I knew," and claimed "In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you come from; it matters only where you are going."
That's not what I learned from Dean Rice. I took his class "The Black Experience in America," and continued to attend the seminars with his encouragement. The seminar was built around a series of invited speakers who lectured in a public form followed by classroom discussions. That's where I met Fanny Lou Hamer, a Black voting rights activist from Sunflower County Mississippi, who led the successful challenge to the all-White Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democrat Convention. That's where I heard Dean Rice explain that he had always refused to register as a Democrat because that was the party of the bigots who had blocked his voter registration when he and his family lived in the South.
Dean Rice may have been registered as a Republican up North, but he taught me about working for progressive social change and opposing institutional racism.
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Chip Berlet Senior Analyst Political Research Associates Webmaster http://www.publiceye.org