Emmett J. Rice served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from June 20, 1979, to December 31, 1986. The Congressional Research Service identifies him among the Black economists who served on the Board.
Emmett John Rice was born on December 21, 1919, in Florence, South Carolina, the son of a Methodist minister and a schoolteacher. The family moved to Harlem when he was thirteen. He earned bachelor's and MBA degrees from the City College of New York in 1941 and 1942.
Drafted during World War II, he trained at the segregated Tuskegee Army Airfield in Alabama and served as a captain in accounting with the Tuskegee Airmen, the country's first Black fighter pilot unit.
A Fulbright scholarship took him to India in 1952, where he also served as a research associate at the Reserve Bank of India. He began teaching economics at Cornell University in 1954 and completed his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1955. While studying there, BlackPast records that he became the first Black American fireman in the Berkeley Fire Department.
From 1962 to 1964, Rice was adviser to the Central Bank of Nigeria, helping formulate financial policy for the newly independent nation. He taught economics at Berkeley and Cornell before working at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1960. His later roles included the Treasury Department's Office of Developing Nations and an appointment as the United States' alternate director at the World Bank in 1966. He joined the National Bank of Washington in 1972 and rose to senior vice president before his Federal Reserve Board service.
President Jimmy Carter appointed Rice to the Board in 1979, making him the second African American member of the Board of Governors, following Andrew Brimmer. From 1979 to 1986, he directed the board's administrative team and oversaw its international organizations and outreach programs, carrying out United States monetary policy in countries across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Rice was the father of Susan Rice, who later served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and national security advisor. He also co-authored a memoir, Education of an Economist: From Fulbright Scholar to the Federal Reserve Board, 1951-1979, published in 1991.
After leaving the Board, Rice served on civic and educational boards in the Washington area. He died on March 10, 2011, in Camas, Washington, at 91.
