by Susan Rice
By college, Emmett knew he did not want to become a third-generation minister. Dad shared with me and Johnny that, as a young boy, he caught his father and other ministers cheating at a competitive game of croquet. My father reasoned that, “If men of God could cheat, then something must be wrong with the church.” After that, Dad had no time for organized religion.
Instead, to his mother’s initial disappointment, Emmett decided to take a less-trodden route at CCNY, attaining his BA in economics in 1941 and his master’s in business administration (MBA) in 1942. As my father later explained to an oral historian at the University of California, Berkeley, he was “a child of the Depression. There was a lot of suffering. Twenty-five percent of the country was unemployed. I wanted to understand an economy which allowed this to happen. I wanted to see if there was anything that could be done to alleviate some of the poverty… pain and suffering, social unrest that I saw.” In his early professional years, my father thought that one could change the world through policy; later, he concluded that the key was not economic policy but economic power.
Like my maternal uncles, and his brother, my uncle Suber, Emmett was drafted into military service at the height of World War II and spent four and a half years in uniform, first as an enlisted man and ultimately as an officer with the rank of captain. Called up by the Army Air Force, he was sent to a two-part officer training program, which began in Miami and was completed at Harvard Business School—where he learned “statistical control” and “quantitative management,” a specialized form of accounting in an unusual program designed to build on his business background.
Emmett eventually deployed to Tuskegee, Alabama, where he joined the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the nation’s first black fighter pilot unit, which distinguished itself in combat in Europe. My father was not a fighter pilot, though he learned to fly, but a staff officer who ran the newly created Statistics Office, which performed management analyses for commanding officers. He earlier served a stint at Godman Field adjacent to Fort Knox, Kentucky. There, segregation meant that he was denied access to the white officers’ club. To add insult to injury, he saw German prisoners of war being served at restaurants restricted to blacks. His time in Tuskegee and Kentucky was a searing reintroduction to southern segregation, both in the military and the confines of off-base life.
Still, socially and intellectually, Dad’s Tuskegee years were formative. He met an elite cadre of African American men who would later disproportionately comprise America’s postwar black professional class, among them my mother’s brothers, Leon and David. Dad’s Tuskegee friends and acquaintances formed a network he maintained throughout his life. What was it, I have often wondered, about those Tuskegee Airmen and support personnel that seemingly enabled them to become a vanguard of black achievement? Perhaps the military preselected unusually well-educated, capable men for Tuskegee, or some aspect of their service experience propelled them as a group to succeed. To my lasting regret, I failed to take the opportunity to study this topic in depth before almost all those heroes passed away.
Following D-Day, my father was sent to the West Coast to prepare to deploy to the Pacific theater. He was spared combat by President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, provoking the Japanese surrender. My dad’s service to our nation has long been a source of pride for me, particularly his affiliation with the celebrated Tuskegee “Red Tails” who defied every expectation of their skill and patriotism.
But not for my father. He suffered from no such romanticism. Until his death, Dad remained bitter about segregation in the military, profoundly objecting to the insult and irony of being made to fight for freedom for all but his own people. As offensive to him was the idea that blacks had to prove their worth to whites. As he explained, “Many black pilots thought that by serving in the Air Force they were proving that they could fly just as well as white pilots. I, on the other hand, resented this notion, believing… we had nothing to prove.” In the same vein, Dad taught me—You don’t have to prove anything to anyone but yourself. Never doubt that you are more than good enough.
It was well after Tuskegee and his graduate education at Berkeley, as a professional in the 1960s, that Dad developed a strong philosophy on how to cope with pervasive discrimination. He grew certain that carrying around the “consciousness of being black continuously is a psychological burden.” He noted, “You cannot bring your best performance to bear as long as you have this additional drag on you. You have to free yourself of this in order to work to your full potential and be able to compete fully.” Somewhat counterintuitively, my father insisted, much like my mother, that we cannot allow ourselves to be defined or bound by race. As hard as it might be and as unrealistic as it may seem, in my dad’s view, it’s always better to try to act, work, and perform as if there were no such thing as discrimination.
My father distilled his hard-won experience, acquired over the years, into foundational “life lessons,” as he called them, which he methodically instilled in me and my brother. Dad summarized another key lesson on race as follows:
I concluded that I am only one person. I am only human, and I cannot carry the burdens of the world around on my shoulder… and at the same time function. So, I was going to be myself, and I was not going to be constantly… on my p’s and q’s because people expected me to. If my being black caused a problem, it was not going to be to me; it was going to be to other people.
As I replay these words in my head, I am struck by how fully I have embraced my father’s philosophy about race (and gender) as my own. My own refusal to allow what I look like to be my problem, one which gets into my head, is fundamental to the mind-set that has helped me succeed. Equally, I internalized Dad’s message that I should never doubt my own abilities. This combination—being a confident black woman who is not seeking permission or affirmation from others—I now suspect accounts for why I inadvertently intimidate some people, especially certain men, and perhaps also why I have long inspired motivated detractors who simply can’t deal with me.
Notwithstanding my dad’s remarkable professional achievements, culminating in serving as a governor of the Federal Reserve, the lingering effects of southern segregation and decades of racial discrimination in the North scarred him deeply. My father chafed as he recalled the closed doors, the low expectations, and being told for so many years what he couldn’t do. He couldn’t eat at a lunch counter outside the base in Alabama. He couldn’t sleep at a hotel when he drove with my mother through the South. He was expected to fight and die for his country, but his country didn’t regard him as a full man. Remarkably, Dad waited to share these frustrations with me and Johnny until we were grown. He shielded us, determined that we never feel constrained by the limitations that tortured him.
Despite all this, my father was a deeply patriotic American. He traveled the world extensively and recognized the exceptional nature of America, its democracy, its values and its institutions. He knew that only in America could he have reached the highest levels of his field and served at the pinnacles of government. Only in America could he raise his black children to believe that we faced no insurmountable hurdles to our success.
Until he died at ninety-one, in 2011, however, my father’s life was a mission to prove America wrong about race. He set out to show that, regardless of the barriers, he could fulfill his God-given potential. And, struggle by struggle, he did. The pain of racist indignities dissipated over time, but never evaporated.
My mother’s experience with race was quite different from my father’s, but their philosophies largely converged. As the daughter of immigrants, raised in an almost all white New England environment, Lois suffered fewer bald and brutal manifestations of discrimination than did my dad in the segregated South. Yet my mother was always a lonely minority and a woman, an outsider striving, never fully accepted into the elite circles in which she ran. Her experiences, less searing but still powerful, left Mom also determined to prove the doubters and de
nigrators wrong. From Radcliffe to her career as a champion of access to higher education for the disadvantaged, from the halls of Congress to corporate boardrooms, Lois would so excel, blowing away all (white) competitors, that no one could deny her worthiness. As she always told us, “never use race as an excuse or an advantage.” Just best them all.
Emmett and Lois Rice raised me and my brother unburdened from the notion that we couldn’t. They taught us that we should be who we are—without apology or regret—and become what we set out to be. The only constraints we faced were our own ambition, effort, and skills (which they assured us were considerable). Still, we had to be about more than making money. We were expected to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others, in whatever way suited us best. Our job was clear—work hard and excel. My parents’ lessons were plain yet powerful:
Don’t take no for an answer when the question is: can I?
Family comes first and must stand together.
Don’t forget where you come from.
2 Coming Up
Through my interactions with him, by early 2006, I came to believe that Obama could run for president as early as 2008. I also saw a path to his potential victory. Conventional political wisdom aside, the timing felt like it might be opportune.
The Iraq War was intensifying and becoming increasingly unpopular. Over two thousand Americans had already been killed since the war began in 2003; the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib rocked global public opinion; and President George W. Bush belatedly admitted that the war was predicated on false intelligence, even as he maintained the fight was worth it. That past summer, Hurricane Katrina left over 1,800 Americans dead, substantially as a result of rank government incompetence, and Bush seemed out of touch with New Orleans’s suffering.
In this context, I sensed a hunger for change—for capable leadership, for unquestioned integrity, for what Obama came to call “turning the page.” As an anti–Iraq War, young, optimistic candidate, Obama was an antidote to the times—refreshing, hopeful, and consistently principled. In my estimation, it was still too soon for another Clinton. After John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, I believed it was time to move beyond the Vietnam generation, and many of my peers felt the same. Obama could energize youth and galvanize the African American community. It was time to show that America could renew itself, and Obama’s election would be irrefutable proof of that.
An Obama victory, however remote it then seemed, represented the potential for America to fully embrace the principle of equality, to show its resilience in overcoming the debilitating legacy of race, and to validate the worth of education, hard work, and integrity as the keys to succeeding on the merits in this country.
A man of mixed race, of African and Irish heritage, raised primarily by his white Kansan working-class grandparents, Obama embodied unity. Insisting that what Americans hold in common far exceeds what divides us, he offered hope that our future could be brighter than our past. I was drawn to his optimism and shared his belief that we could forge alliances across political, racial, and religious boundaries. Indeed, that had been my experience growing up in Washington, D.C.—in a mixed black and Jewish neighborhood, in school with Republicans and Democrats, and shaped by parents who had broken countless barriers.
They never talked about it. Strangely, my brother and I know almost nothing about my parents’ courtship or their wedding, a second marriage for each. And, somehow, we never asked, maybe because they had such a difficult relationship.
Though fourteen years apart, my parents each came into their own in the 1950s—my mother while an undergraduate at Radcliffe and my father after the war during his formative years as a graduate student at Berkeley. By the time they met in New York in the early 1960s, both were rising in their chosen professions.
At the all-women’s Radcliffe College, despite its academic excellence, my mother found that accomplishment was defined not in professional terms but rather as marrying a Harvard man and raising your sons to go to Harvard. Women were admonished to be prissy and prim, while adhering to “the forbidden six: no slacks, no shorts, no blue jeans, no sprawling in the buildings or on the steps, no smoking in any Harvard building… and no bicycle riding in the Harvard Yard (Harvard men can’t ride there either).” Dating was encouraged. To my amazement, the 1951–1952 Radcliffe Red Book advised young women: “Cambridge is a well-stocked hunting ground, and it’s a wide-open field. There are enough men to go around (recent tabulations tabbed the man-woman ratio at five to one). Just remember, no pushing and shoving.” To reward the successful, “The first girl in each class to be married following graduation is presented with a set of Radcliffe China by other members of the class,” and “the first baby girl to be born… is presented with a silver spoon and becomes the mascot of her mother’s class.”
My mother was one of only a handful of black women at Radcliffe. In her first year, her roommate was determined by race, and she was placed with Dorothy Dean, one of three black women in her class. The other, Jane Bunche, who later committed suicide, was the daughter of Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Prize–winning American U.N. diplomat.
Lois Dickson and Dorothy Dean could not have been more mismatched. Eccentric and hard-drinking, Dean later became known for her roles in various Andy Warhol films and as a fixture in New York gay men’s circles. Mom shared with me her impression that Dorothy was “truly crazy and aimed to drive me equally nuts.” For her sanity, Lois requested a different roommate her second year but was refused, because there were no other black girls with whom she could room. Moreover, as a scholarship student, she was not eligible for a single.
Characteristically relentless, Lois took her protest to the top of the college’s administration and, ultimately, was rewarded with a coveted single room. I always admired and sought to emulate my mom’s readiness to stand up and fight for herself. My mama wasn’t going to let either Dorothy or Radcliffe kill her; she would torture them into submission first.
A natural advocate for others as well as for herself, Lois joined the Radcliffe Association for the Advancement of Colored People to press the concerns of black students on campus and in the greater Boston area. Despite being a rare minority, Mom swiftly emerged as a leader at Radcliffe, first elected to student council her freshman year and then president of her sophomore class. She ultimately won a hotly contested battle for student body president her senior year. (Remarkably, her distant cousin, Clifford Alexander, another child of Jamaican immigrants, was elected the following year to head Harvard’s student government.)
As a student, Lois accumulated numerous academic awards, graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in history and literature. As well as Lois performed at Radcliffe, she fell a bit short of her own expectations, lamenting that she failed to achieve Phi Beta Kappa during her junior year or to graduate summa cum laude, as her brothers had. Her self-doubt notwithstanding, Mom was selected as Marshall of her Class of 1954, leading the commencement procession, and made several dear friends whom she kept until her death.
Moved by the politics of the day, the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, Lois left Radcliffe determined to do much more than marry and raise children. Despite being an African American woman in the early 1950s, or perhaps because of it, Lois was going places far beyond what was asked or expected of her. Soon after graduation, she enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in English literature; but, after one year, Lois concluded that academia didn’t inspire her.
Instead, she worked avidly on Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. Mom bragged about being “a Stevenson girl” who proudly served in various capacities, including as a campaign surrogate in local debates where she argued passionately that Stevenson uniquely had the commitment and the ideals to capitalize on the Brown decision and make America more equitable. His loss, a major disappointment to her, may have persuaded Lois to trade politics for other avenues of service.
M
om’s first full-time job out of college reflected her personal mission to expand access to the transformative power of higher education, a calling that animated her entire career. As director of counseling services at the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, the organization that had helped support her through Radcliffe, Mom provided counseling, as well as admissions and financial support, to qualified African American students to help them attend predominantly white colleges and universities.
One of my favorite stories from Mom’s tenure at NSSFNS involves a trip she took as the organization’s counselor to check on the sole black student in a class of four hundred at DePauw University in Indiana. Mom asked the young man how he was doing. He cheekily reported: “I am fine, except I’m lonely and need a date with an attractive young black woman. You wanna go out with me?” According to both sides, Lois remained resolutely professional and demurred, despite her suitor’s arresting good looks. Thus began a lifelong, flirtatious friendship between my mom and the famed civil rights activist and Washington lawyer Vernon Jordan. To my knowledge, my mother never succumbed to his considerable charms, but I couldn’t have blamed her if she had.
In 1959, Lois moved to the New York–based College Entrance Examination Board (CEEB), now the College Board, which administers the SAT and AP tests. With the exception of two brief sabbaticals, she stayed there until 1981.
Like many of her peers, Lois did marry right out of college—to the much older James Theodore “Ted” Irish, a classmate of her brother Fred’s at Bowdoin. Irish was an interior designer who worked at the Corn Exchange Bank of New York City. Lois’s parents hosted a lavish wedding for them in New York City in September 1954. Mom’s first wedding was amply covered in the social pages of The New York Times. She would enthusiastically relate the details of her elaborate church wedding and reception at the Essex House Hotel, which her parents hosted despite their limited means. In her glamorous wedding photos, Lois Ann Dickson Irish was the quintessential bride—svelte and gorgeous in her long-sleeve silk and lace dress with a full train and intricate bouquet.
