Condi in Alabama

Condoleezza Rice has been talking lately about her desire to give foreign dignitaries a glimpse of the "real America." So, this past weekend, she brought British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw here to Alabama. It may amuse certain residents of the parentheses states that anyone would think of Alabama as "real America," but before bursting into laughter, they should consider a few things...

Secretary Rice was born and raised in the community of Titusville, near Birmingham, so it's not surprising that she would want to take her British counterpart - as the representative of America's closest ally - on a tour of the places where she spent her childhood and to introduce him to the people she knows so well.

So, a trip to Alabama was a logical choice, but it was much more than that. Alabama is the place where many of the nation's civil rights battles were fought and won. For many years, it was ground zero in America's war to secure the blessings of liberty for all its citizens.

Condoleezza Rice and her family moved away from Alabama when she was 13, in the days when segregation was making its last stand. Many of her memories are of the way it was then, when she was a child in the 1950's and '60's, only mildly aware of politics and even less so of her own "place" in the social order.

Today, she often recalls the little things from life in those days. At least now they seem little, but to a child, they were the world: growing up in a safe, comfortable neighborhood surrounded by friends and family; going to church on Sundays; taking ballet and piano lessons; watching football on TV with her dad; and learning that discipline and perseverance were the keys to overcoming the injustices of the society she lived in.

Those injustices were visible all around her. There was the local amusement park, which was open to "colored" kids like her only one day a year; the department store, where the only dressing room for little black girls was a storage closet; the local drive-in restaurant, where her parents bought her a hamburger one afternoon, only to find that it was filled with nothing but onions.

But, those injustices were just minor inconveniences compared to the big things - the night-riders, Bull Connor's fire hoses, and the bomb that killed one of her young friends and three other little girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. "I remember more than anything the coffins. The small coffins. And the sense that Birmingham wasn’t a very safe place," she said. Undoubtedly, Condi and many other Alabamians of all races and creeds also asked themselves that day what "sin" these precious children committed to have deserved such a fate. There may even have been a sense of unity, even if it only went so far as calling evil by its name.

Thankfully, the Alabama that Condoleezza Rice visited this weekend is very different from the one she left over 30 years ago. Alabama, which was once the focal point for America's struggle to deal with its own original sin, is now the subject of a remarkable success story. It took a long time for the civil rights movement to win the "hearts and minds" of most Alabamians - but today, we've passed the tipping point, and there's no going back. That's something that all "real Americans" can be proud of as we help friends and would-be friends around the globe in their own struggles for freedom and democracy.