Did Rice tell a Hillary-type whopper?

The reference is to Hillary Clinton’s one-time claim that she was named after Edmund Hillary, who, of course, climbed Mount Everest in 1953, six years after Hillary Rodharm was born. Condoleezza Rice, in describing Mahmoud Abbas as the Martin Luther King of the Palestinians and saying she recalls riding on segregated buses as a child, seems to have claimed a childhood memory it is unlikely she could have had.

From the Joel Fishman article I quoted earlier:

For Dr. Rice the struggle of the Palestinians is analogous to that of the Afro-Americans for civil rights and she identifies with the Palestinians. She recalled what it meant to travel in segregated buses as a little girl in Alabama.

Bill in Maryland sends this:

On February 1, 1956, the Montgomery Improvement Association filed suit in the United States District Court challenging the constitutionality of bus segregation…. In June of 1956, the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the Montgomery Improvement Association. The city appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court. In mid-November, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling; it declared that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. Implementation of the Court’s decision took place on December 20, 1956.

The same facts are reported here. Also, here is an article from the Montgomery Advertiser dated November 13, 1956 announcing the Supreme Court decision that ended segregated seating in buses, following the long bus boycott in Montgomery.

Bill points out that according to Wikipedia Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama on November 14, 1954. If the Supreme Court decision was implemented on December 20, then Rice was two years and one month old when all segregated busing in the United States was ended.

But this is not nailed down yet. For one thing, it’s not certain that segregated bus seating was ended in December 1956 in Birmingham, as distinct from Montgomery. Maybe it took months or years for the practice to be ended throughout the South, though that seems unlikely. Also, I haven’t found a direct quote of Rice saying she recalls traveling in segregated buses.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2007 02:28 PM | Send