Emmett J Rice

Emmett John Rice was born in Florence, S.C., on Dec. 21, 1919, the youngest of four children of Ulysses and Sue Pearl Rice. He earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from the City University of New York. After serving with the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, Rice earned a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the early 1950s, while an assistant in the economics department at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Rice received a Fulbright fellowship that took him to India, where he became a research associate at the Reserve Bank of India. After teaching at Berkeley and then Cornell, Dr. Rice took a sabbatical in 1960 to work as an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. But two years later, the United States Agency for International Development lured him to a post in newly independent Nigeria, where he lent his expertise to the creation of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The Treasury Department then recruited Dr. Rice, naming him, in 1964, deputy director of its Office of Developing Nations, where he helped formulate financial policies affecting countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. That led, in 1966, to his appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson as alternate director for the United States at the World Bank and, subsequently, acting director. Besides his daughter, Dr. Rice is survived by a son, E. John Rice Jr., and four grandchildren. His marriage to Lois Dickson Rice ended in divorce.