Condoleezza Rice: Southern Baptist Convention [View All]

If she's not running for President, why is she speaking there?


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Thursday, 15 June 2006, 10:35 am
Press Release: US State Department

Remarks at the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting


Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Greensboro Coliseum
Greensboro, North Carolina
June 14, 2006

link: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0606/S00311.htm

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Well, thank you. Thank you for that terrific welcome. Thank you, Bobby, for that kind introduction and let me also recognize Dr. Morris Chapman and Dr. Richard Land. I want to thank all of you for giving me the opportunity to be here in Greensboro today and a chance to have a conversation with you.

It's a great honor to be joined by thousands of people of faith here today at the Southern Baptist Convention. You are all individual messengers of independent churches, but today, through you, America's 16 million Southern Baptists celebrate their unity. Yesterday the democratic voice of your church spoke and I would like to congratulate Pastor Frank Page of Taylors, South Carolina, who now has the privilege of serving as the new elected leader of America's Southern Baptists. (Applause.)

Now, I am a Presbyterian. (Laughter.) But I want to tell you why I'm a Presbyterian. I trace the roots of my faith back to my granddaddy. Granddaddy Rice was a poor sharecropper's son in Eutaw, Alabama. That's E-u-t-a-w, Alabama. (Laughter.) And one day he decided he was going to get book learning, so he asked where a colored man could go to college. And they told him that there was this little school called Stillman College. It was about 60 miles away from where he lived and he could go to Stillman College and get an education. So Granddaddy Rice saved up his tuition, saved up his cotton, and he went off to school and he finished his first year, and they said, "Well, that's very good. Now how are you going to pay for your second year?" And he said, "Well, I'm fresh out of cotton." And they said, "Well, you'll have to leave."

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