Condoleezza Rice - Extraordinary, Ordinary People

1920The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution gives women the right to vote.

1954In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , the U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

1954November 14: Condoleezza Rice is born in Birmingham, Alabama.

1955In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white man and move to the back of the bus, where black people were forced to sit. The yearlong boycott of the city’s buses (led by Martin Luther King Jr.) ends when the U.S. Supreme Court declares Montgomery’s segregated transportation system unconstitutional.

1957Fred Shuttlesworth, Charles K. Steele, Martin Luther King Jr., and many other civil rights leaders establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to end segregation through nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

1957President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect black students after the state militia prevents them from entering a public high school. The governor is forced to comply with U.S. desegregation laws.

1960John F. Kennedy is elected the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

1962Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor closes public recreational facilities to avoid integration.

1962John Glenn becomes the first American astronaut to orbit the earth.

1963April 16: Martin Luther King Jr. is jailed during civil rights protests in Birmingham. During his imprisonment, he writes his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” urging eight fellow clergymen to support the cause of desegregation.

1963May 2: Hundreds of students participate in the Children’s Crusade for civil rights in Birmingham.

1963August 28: A crowd of 250,000 attends the March on Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

1963September 15: Four young girls are killed and more than twenty people are injured when the predominantly black Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed. In the aftermath of protests later that day, sixteen-year-old Johnny Robinson is shot in the back by police, and thirteen-year-old Virgil Wade is shot by a group of teenagers while riding his bike. Both teenagers are black.

1963November 22: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

1963November 22: Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

1964July 2: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin.

1965Congress passes the Voting Rights Act; states can no longer restrict voter eligibility by requiring literacy tests or poll taxes, and federal oversight of elections is broadened.

1966The Rice family moves to Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

1968April 4: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis. Riots break out in cities across the country.

1968June 5: Robert “Bobby” Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles.

1968August 20: Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia.

1968August 26–29: At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War turn bloody when crowds clash with police.

1968The Rice family moves to Denver.

1974August 9: Richard Nixon resigns as thirty-seventh president of the United States after attempting to cover up his role in break-ins at the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex.

1974Condoleezza Rice begins graduate school at the University of Notre Dame.

1976James Earl “Jimmy” Carter is elected the thirty-ninth president of the United States.

1980The United States and approximately sixty other countries boycott the Summer Olympics in Moscow in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

1981Condoleezza Rice receives her PhD from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver and joins the faculty at Stanford University in California.

1985Mikhail Gorbachev becomes general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1985Angelena Rice dies in Denver.

1988George H. W. Bush, who was vice president under President Ronald Reagan, is elected the forty-first president of the United States.

1989–1991Condoleezza Rice serves on the National Security Council under President George H. W. Bush.

1989November 9: The Berlin Wall is opened.

1991Boris Yeltsin seizes power from Mikhail Gorbachev, and the USSR is disbanded.

1993Condoleezza Rice becomes provost of Stanford University.

2000George W. Bush is elected the forty-third president of the United States.

2000John Rice dies in Palo Alto, California.

2001January 20: Condoleezza Rice is appointed national security advisor.

2005January 26: Condoleezza Rice is appointed secretary of state.

Abernathy, Ralph (1926–1990):Civil rights leader, a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the man Martin Luther King Jr. described as his best friend. In 1968, when King was shot, Abernathy held him in his arms as he died. Weeks later, Abernathy went on to lead the Poor People’s Campaign march on Washington. He continued to spearhead efforts to improve the lives of disenfranchised Americans of all races until his death.

Affirmative Action:Policy of offering increased economic, political, and social opportunities to minorities, women, and other underrepresented groups with the goal of increasing diversity and correcting years of discrimination. The practice is the subject of much controversy.

Albright, Tenley (1935–):American figure skater, winner of the silver medal at the 1952 Olympics and the gold medal at the 1956 Olympics. Albright took up skating when she was a girl as part of her recovery from polio. In 1961, she graduated from Harvard University and became a surgeon.

Attica Correctional Facility:In September 1971, inmates of this New York prison revolted to protest bad conditions, taking control of the facility and holding a number of guards hostage. The riot ended after four days with ten prison employees and twenty-nine prisoners dead.

Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750):German composer highly regarded for his religious pieces and organ works.

Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827):Influential pianist and composer of symphonies. Before he turned thirty, he began to lose his hearing, but he continued to produce extraordinary pieces despite his deafness later in life.

Berlin Wall (1961–1989):Guarded barrier separating West Berlin from East Berlin and East Germany during the Cold War. By the early 1950s, Germany and its capital city, Berlin, had been divided into two territories: West Germany, allied with the United States, Great Britain and France, and East Germany, allied with the Soviet Union. The Wall became symbolic of the divide between communist Eastern Europe and the democratic West. The Berlin Wall collapsed on November 9, 1989, ushering in a series of events that unified East and West Germany and ended the Cold War.