Right Resistance

A Tale Of Two Characters

January 23, 2009 at 10:57 am | Posted in Obama | Leave a comment
Tags: condoleeza rice, dr. martin luther king, Obama

One was raised in segregated Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement.

A childhood friend, 11-year-old Denise McNair, was one of the four young girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.  About her upbringing, she says,  “My parents had me absolutely convinced that, well, you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth’s but you can be President of the United States.”

She mastered the piano at three, and was told that she could have had a career as a concert pianist. She skipped first and seventh grades, entered college at 15, holds three degrees including a doctorate in political science, and earned her Master’s in just one year’s study. She’s fluent in four languages.

She was a professor of Political Science at Stanford from 1981-99, and from 1993-99 she was also Stanford’s provost, responsible for overseeing the school’s budget and academic programs.

She joined the Stanford University faculty as a professor of political science in 1981 and served as Stanford University’s provost from 1993 to 1999. She was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1991 to 1993 and returned to the Hoover Institution after serving as provost until 2001. As a professor, she won two of the highest teaching honors: the 1984 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 1993 School of Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

She has authored and coauthored several books, including Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995), with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986), with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984).

The other was born in Hawaii to a Kenyan and a Kansan.

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