Few things are as repulsive as Black conservatives trying to advance the Republican agenda by mischaracterizing the Civil Rights Movement or distorting history. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice provided a textbook example of this during a recent appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

When asked her thoughts on gun control, Rice replied: “Well, Larry, I come out of a – my personal experiences in which in Birmingham, Ala., my father and his friends defended our community in 1962 and 1963 against White nightriders by going to the head of the community, the head of the cul-de-sac, and sitting there armed. And so I’m very concerned about any abridgement of the Second Amendment…”

Moments later, she added: “…We have to be very careful when we start abridging rights that our Founding Fathers thought very important. And on this one, I think that they understood that there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Ala., when, in fact, the police weren’t going to protect you.”

This expert in Soviet history obviously hasn’t studied enough American history. There is no evidence that the Founding Fathers – or the Fondling Fathers, as I like to call some of them – were in the least bit worried about African-Americans being able to protect themselves against White supremacists. In fact, half of them owned slaves. So did nine U.S. presidents.

To brush up on her American history, Rice should read the expert witness testimony submitted by Eric Foner, then-president of the American Historical Association, in connection with the University of Michigan’s defense of its affirmative action programs before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Slaves, of course, experienced the institution of politics and law quite differently from white Americans,” wrote Foner, a history professor at Columbia University. “Before the law, slaves were property who had virtually no legal rights. They could be bought, sold, leased, and seized to satisfy an owner’s debt, their family ties had no legal standing, and they could not leave the plantation or hold meetings without the permission of their owner.”

Given the treatment of African-Americans, it is incredulous to assert, as Rice does, that the Founding Fathers were even remotely concerned about allowing Blacks to protect themselves.

This is not the first time Rice has distorted facts for political gain.

Speaking at the 2000 Republican convention, Rice praised her father as “the first Republican I knew.” She declared, “Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.”

What Rice forgot was the truth: political parties don’t register voters in Alabama. Voters are added to the voting rolls by registrars. A profile of Rice written by Dale Russakoff, a reporter for the Washington Post and native of Birmingham, was even more telling.

After a White registrar asked Rice’s father a trick question to keep him from registering, according to Russakoff: “Rice says her father later learned of a Republican functionary in the registrar’s office who would register blacks secretly, as long as they registered Republicans – not the expansive grant of suffrage suggested in her speech.”

Rice’s exploitation of the Civil Rights Movement is even more notable because her middle-class parents, by her own admission, were not active in the movement. Her father, John Rice, was a minister and her mother, Angelena, was a school teacher.

The Washington Post profile revealed, “On both sides of her family, Condi Rice is descended from white slave owners as well as black slaves; and the slaves were mostly ‘house slaves,’ as opposed to ‘field slaves,’ according to Connie Rice [Condoleezza’s cousin].”

Many middle-class Blacks waited for working class African-Americans to bring down barriers that would especially benefit better educated African-Americans.

“Condi Rice says her father embraced [the movement’s] goals, but not its means,” the profile of her explained. “’My father was not a march-in-the-street preacher,’ she says. He strenuously opposed the tactic that ultimately broke white business resistance to ending segregation in stores downtown – recruiting children to march into police commissioner Bull Connor’s phalanx of officers, police dogs and fire hoses, and overflow the jails. ‘He saw no reason to put children at risk,’ Rice says. ‘He would never put his own children at risk.’”