Saturday,
December 22, 2007
Condoleezza Rice: Her Italian Ancestry ??
The
ANNOTICO Report
"Condoleezza
Rice: An American Life", with an excerpt below of Chapter 1, makes it
clear why Condoleezza is Republican. All her relatives during the 1900s
were college educated and leaders in the black Presbyterian Church, and
therefore considered themselves as Elite and
Patricians. Rice grew up seeing herself as part of the nation's founding
culture. At the least, her ancestry was a crucial part of the self-confidence
that fueled her rise. She never considered herself an outsider or called
herself an "African-American"- to her ears an immigrant designation
she has always rejected. In fact Many discussions
were held amongst her fellow Blacks as to who had the most Aristocratic White
ancestors. We have long known that "house niggers" looked down on
"field niggers", and "light skinned"
blacks looked down on "dark skinned" blacks. Here Condoleezza
distances herself immeasurably from the poor or working blacks!!
In
Rice's family, the Italian
ancestry appears to have been a source of pride,
although Rice knows little about Alto-her great-great grandfather (on her
Mother's side)-or the nature of his relationship to her
great-great-grandmother. But at least according
to Rice family lore, Alto was the white owner of the plantation, and his mother
was a favored black servant in the plantation household. The family has no
written record of Alto, and there are no clues in the 1890 or 1900
The
Italian ancestry was valued enough to make the family pass Italian names down
through succeeding generations. Albert Robinson Ray III's
brother was named Alto,
and later, Albert would name one of his own sons Alto-Alto Ray, Condoleezza
Rice's uncle. Two of the other children of Albert- Angelena and Genoa-also had Italian
names.
Condoleezza
is of course an Italian name, too, made up by Rice's mother from the Italian
musical notation, "con dolcezza," which
means "with sweetness." The family story has always been that Rice's
mother picked the name because she was a classically trained musician and loved
Italian opera. But in an interview in late 2006 Rice suggested that her
name was in part inspired by the man she believes to be her Italian ancestor.
"Alto, as you can tell, is an Italian name," Rice said, adding,
"as is Condoleezza."
Condoleezza seems to have little to say about her
"other" white ethnicity of Rice's great-great grandmother Julia
Head, a mixed-race daughter fathered by a white plantation owner, to
another favored black house servant.
One
would think that if she had SO much pride in her Italian ancestry, that she would have
spent a little time, finding out more about the Alto family, and it's origins. Perhaps she could then find some Italian
Nobility that she could claim. :)
Poor me. I had no Plantation Owner ancestors,nor did any of my ancestors work in mansions,
but were coal miners. Does that make me ineligible to apply to
being an Elitist and Patrician, or even a Republican ?????
:)
BOOK
EXCERPT
Wall Street Journal
December 22, 2007
By
Elisabeth Bumiller
Chapter 1: Twice as
Good
The
story of Condoleezza Rice begins at the close of the nineteenth century on a
cotton plantation in southeastern
In
1892, according to the census records of the surrounding
Rice
also knew that one of her great-aunts, Nancy Ray, had sandy-colored hair and
blue eyes. That was clear from the photographs of
Whatever
the specifics of Rice's ancestry-the family says there were white landowners
(amcestors), favored household servants, and
education going back generations on her father's side as well-the important
point is that it powerfully shaped her view of herself as a black patrician.
Any serious look at her life must begin here, in an intermingling of the races
and two separate strands of American history. Rice grew up seeing herself as
part of the nation's founding culture. At the least, her ancestry was a
crucial part of the self-confidence that fueled her rise. She never
considered herself an outsider or called herself an
"African-American"-to her ears an immigrant designation she has
always rejected.
"We
have a racial birth defect that we've never quite dealt with," Rice said. "Which is that, really, there were two founding
races-Europeans and Africans. They came here together, there was
miscegenation. We founded and built this country together, and we are more
intertwined and intertangled than we would like to
think."
She has long said that the shock over Thomas Jefferson's relationship with the
slave Sally Hemmings was misplaced and naive,
although she acknowledges the legacy of rape that produced so many mixed-race
children in the South at the time. "It's a legacy that was basically not
one of choice and volition but of violence and oppression," she said.
"And so I think that's why people have trouble admitting it and talking
about it and understanding it."
In
Rice's family, the Italian ancestry appears to have been a source of pride, or
at least was valued enough to make the family pass Italian names down through
succeeding generations. Albert Robinson Ray III's
brother was named Alto, and later, Albert would name one of his own sons
Alto-Alto Ray, Condoleezza Rice's uncle. Two of the other children of Albert-Angelena and Genoa-also had Italian names.
Condoleezza
is of course an Italian name, too, made up by Rice's mother from the Italian
musical notation, "con dolcezza," which
means "with sweetness." The family story has always been that Rice's
mother picked the name because she was a classically trained musician and loved
Italian opera. But in an interview in late 2006 Rice suggested that her name
was in part inspired by the man she believes to be her Italian ancestor.
"Alto, as you can tell, is an Italian name," Rice said, adding,
"as is Condoleezza."
In
Union Springs in the 1890s, little is known of Albert Robinson Ray III,
Condoleezza Rice's grandfather, other than his likely labor in the cotton
fields. Rice family lore picks him up again at the age of eleven, around 1904,
when a white man is said to have assaulted his sister. Albert responded to the attack
by beating up the white man, a crime so severe for a black youth that he fled
Union Springs, terrified that he would be lynched. His fears were not
unfounded: Like much of the South,
As
the Rice family tells it, Albert ended up at a
Albert
Ray may have been fleeing, but in 1904 he was also following the well-beaten
path of black field laborers to "The
The
city had been incorporated in 1871 by ten investors who formed the Elyton Land Company in what was then the town of
In
1918, Albert Ray was still working in the Wheelers' mine when he married, at
the age of twenty-eight, Mattie Lula Parham, a classically trained pianist and
a graduate of St. Mark's Academy in
"I
guess we might have been poor, but we never knew we were poor," Genoa McPhatter, the youngest child, said. "I can remember
we always got practically everything that we wanted." The family dressed
well-"Mother shopped at expensive stores for us, so consequently we grew
up into clothes," McPhatter said-and had an ease
with white people. "My daddy had a lot of white friends," McPhatter said, recalling how whites would come in for
horseshoes to her father's blacksmith shop. "To be perfectly frank, we
didn't even realize when they would come that it was segregation, because they
had such a good relationship there together."
Albert
and Mattie Lula sent all five children to black colleges in the South:
Angelena went on to teach music and science southwest of
It
was at Fairfield High that Angelena met a fellow
teacher, John Wesley Rice, Jr. He was a big man, charismatic and outgoing. On
Sundays he preached in
John
Rice's grandmother was Julia Head, the mixed-race daughter of a white
plantation owner-Condoleezza Rice's great-great-grandfather-and another favored
black house slave from
Julia
could read and write, as could the man she married, a former slave from
"George
W. Bush would have liked Granddaddy Rice," Rice told the delegates.
"He was the son of a farmer in rural
Granddaddy
Rice was told of Stillman, where he enrolled but ran
out of cotton to pay for tuition after his first year. What was he to do?
"Praise be, as he often does, God gave him an
answer," Condoleezza Rice told the crowd. "My grandfather asked how
those other boys were staying in school, and he was told that they had what was
called a scholarship. And they said, 'If you wanted to be a Presbyterian
minister, then you can have one, too.' Granddaddy Rice said, 'That's just what
I had in mind.' "
Rice
drove home her point: "And my family has been Presbyterian and
college-educated ever since."
Granddaddy
Rice's education encompassed literature as well. In a story that Condoleezza
Rice has often told, her grandfather spent the astonishing sum of $90 during
the Depression on seven leather-bound, gold-embossed books, including the works
of Dumas, Shakespeare, and Hugo. When Rice's wife objected, he told her not to worry, he would pay for them over time. (In later years his
niece, Theresa Love, Condoleezza Rice's aunt, would go to the
Granddaddy
Rice's first congregation was in
Three
years later, on Valentine's Day 1954, John Rice, Jr., and Angelena Ray were married by Granddaddy Rice in Angelena's mother's music room in the family house in
Excerpted
from Condoleezza Rice: An American Life by Elisabeth Bumiller
Copyright ) 2007 by Elisabeth Bumiller.
Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All
rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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