| | Rice 'especially proud' of Obama victory
 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, while speaking to the press, expressed pride in witnessing Senator Obama's win of the presidency in Tuesday's election.
Sec. Rice, having spent her early childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, witnessed the Jim Crow era firsthand. In a 2004 interview with The Sunday Times, she credited her parents with an upbringing that focused on education, dignity and achievement, even as she was prevented from going to the local amusement park or the circus and using dressing rooms when buying clothes, and watched civil rights demonstrators suffer acts of police brutality.
At her Vanderbilt University commencement speech in 2004, Rice recalled the death of a schoolmate in an infamous church bombing:
"I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed."
"As an African-American, I'm especially proud," Sec. Rice said on Wednesday, "because this is a country that's been through a long journey in terms of overcoming wounds and making race not the factor in our lives. That work is not done, but yesterday was obviously an extraordinary step forward."
This video is from MSNBC's News Live, broadcast November 5, 2008.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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