Ambassador Susan E Rice, US Permanent Representative to the United Nations — who was recently noted by The Telegraph as being a top candidate to replace Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and whom president Barack Obama applauded for being ‘extraordinary’ — has her roots firmly planted in The Rock. Rice’s mother’s parents are Jamaican emigrants who left the country in 1912 to live in Portland, Maine.

In a speech at Howard University’s 145th Convocation Rice gave insight into her family’s history. “With little formal education, my grandfather took the best job he could get-as a janitor. My grandmother was a maid and a seamstress”, she stated. “But my grandparents managed to scrape and save to send all five of their children to college -four sons to Bowdoin and my mom, Lois, to Harvard-Radcliffe where she was student government president,” she further stated. Her mother, in turn, devoted her distinguished career to making higher education more accessible to all.

With all the struggles both her parents and grandparents went through to to allow her and her siblings to live the American dream, she is happy to have a job that would make them proud. “I am here today because of these profoundly American stories of struggle and success,” she shared. “I wish my grandfather could have imagined, as he bent over his broom, that his granddaughter would someday serve in the cabinet of the first African-American President of the United States,” she continued.