I just finished reading an article in Salon.com called
The performer lost in her performance
, by Alan Gilbert (one of her professors). I noticed the following (quoted from the article and referring to her father) because I had never heard this about Dr. Rice & it seemed amazing:
But John Rice's story, too, has another side. In 1963, the Ku Klux Klan blew up a church in Birmingham and murdered four schoolgirls. John Rice, the minister, patrolled his neighborhood with a shotgun to prevent further Klan attacks.
I did some searching (just using Google) and couldn't find much,
Prometheus 6, a blog article that says that she is a survivor of that bombing herself, and a bunch of articles that say she was a classmate of one of the girls. But nothing about her father being the minister of that church.
And the following quote from Sara in a comment here at the DailyKos
Condi is from Birmingham Al. Her Father was minister to a congregation (AME if I remember rightly) that very strongly opposed Martin Luther King and the Birmingham protests. Her father approved the use of fire hoses on the children by the local cops (you'll find him quoted to that effect in the papers of the times (1983)), and apparently he was not on speaking terms with the Ministers in Shuttlesworth's group that brought King and SCLC into Birmingham. There is considerable evidence that Condi's dad served as an informant to the local police and the FBI -- informing on those organizing in NAACP for instance, which for a time was held to be an illegal organization under Alabama Law -- the Supremes had to take care of that minor bit of "right to assemble" Constitutional Law.
She was a pre-teen at the time of Birmingham, and she grew up in the good Christian manner of honoring her Father's opinions. There is some evidence she knew one of the girls killed in the Birmingham Church Bombing case (Sept 1963) -- but that is not all that clear, and she never talks about it.
This seems to totally contradict the Salon article.
And now I'm wondering if these contradictions are a result of her being a lying liar, or others, including me are just misunderstanding her history.
(On proofreading this diary, I wonder if the professor is just saying that her father was a minister -- not necessarily the minister of that church. Maybe I got all excited about nothing more than a sloppy sentence or two?)