On her terms

Constance Rice is a fighter.

In more ways than you’d think. Angry at herself for not fighting back when a man physically attacked her in college, she took up martial arts. She vowed to put the next guy in the hospital — and did.

But she actually prefers legal combat. Her fearlessness has made her one of the most successful civil rights attorneys in the country.

The outspoken Rice, a litigator and co-founder of the public policy and legal action group Advancement Project, has very clear views on equal rights and our failing democracy. She has spent her career fighting for social justice, urban peace, equal opportunity and upward mobility for the poor and disadvantaged, or, as Rice and her colleagues call them, “those left behind in America.”

Anyone who can take on government bureaucracy, police misconduct and gang violence has to possess guts, intelligence and ambition, though Rice is the first to admit that her seemingly bottomless well of courage isn’t always a wise thing to tap into.

“There have been times when we should have been afraid, but we don’t think to be afraid, and it would have been prudent to be afraid,” Rice said during a recent interview in the conference room of her Wilshire Boulevard office.

Rice co-founded Advancement Project with fellow lawyers Stephen R. English and Molly Munger in 1998 because she realized that it would take more than litigation to “make a bureaucracy permanently change how it treats folks at the bottom and to operate at a much higher level so that you actually end poverty rather than just palliate it.

“We kind of outgrew the civil rights organizations because we needed new capacities,” explained Rice, former co-director of the LA office of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “We needed to be able to run elections. We needed to be able to get inside and sit on boards. You can get a whole lot more done by sitting inside a place and re-engineering it from the inside than you can by fighting on the outside.

“So we wanted to get inside the castle as opposed to trying to cross the moat and storm the rampart, which is what litigation is,” she said with a laugh that seems to punctuate many of her anecdotes.

Case in point: Rice went from suing the LAPD to working on reforms with Chief William Bratton when she was appointed by the Los Angeles Police Commission to lead a blue ribbon panel investigating the Rampart Division corruption scandal.

Of course, Rice, who earned her law degree at New York University School of Law, has experienced plenty of successes with litigation over the years. One of her high-profile cases involved unfair public policy in transportation in the ’90s. On the conference room wall, a poster of a can of sardines recalls the landmark battle for the Bus Riders Union: “No Somos Sardinas. We won’t stand for it.”

“We use our litigation to change systems, to help poor folks get access to transportation, housing, jobs, training, education — just remove barriers,” Rice said. “Trying to help the poor end their own poverty [has been] the goal of a lot of our cases.”

While working toward that goal, Rice has earned more than 50 awards for leadership and service. Among those are Civil Rights Lawyer of the Year in 1999 from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. That same year, California Law Business named her one of the state’s top 10 most influential lawyers. In 2002, she received the John Anson Ford Humanitarian Award from Los Angeles County. She received an honorary doctor of law degree from Occidental College in 2003. This month she was awarded the Racial Justice Award from the Pasadena chapter of the YWCA.

Though the list goes on and on, her accomplishments seem to be rewards in themselves. Next to getting three innocent men off of death row, however, Rice said her most important achievement was earning her black belt in tae kwon do. It was one of the hardest things she ever did.

“It’s an all-male world, and it’s physical combat. Women aren’t trained to do that,” said Rice, who convinced a South Korean instructor to take on his first female student years ago. “So not only do I do verbal combat and legal combat, but I do physical combat.”

That impulse toward self-preservation developed after a man physically assaulted her when she was a student of government at Harvard.

“I got mad because he wasn’t that big, and I should have been able to kick the crap out of him, but it didn’t occur to me because I hadn’t been trained to fight. Women are trained to be fearful of their physical space. It made me realize that the next time that happens, he’s going to end up in the hospital.”

With the casual laugh that she uses often in conversation, perhaps to deflect the seriousness of the issues she deals with on a daily basis, Rice said her next attacker did end up needing medical attention.

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been attacked several times. Men don’t manage their anger very well; they don’t manage their sexuality well, on the whole. There are a lot of wonderful men — but on the whole, men are a danger to women, they’re a menace,” she said. She then cited statistics about violence toward women and children: Statistically, women are safer on the street than at home because of the prevalence of domestic violence; a third of all women will be victims of some kind of sexual misconduct; and a quarter of boys and a third of girls are sexually approached and many sexually abused.

“Ninety percent of the violence that’s sexual and against children is done by men in our families who are heterosexual, and that’s across race and class,” Rice continued. “This is a male problem. Our gangs, 99 percent male. The gun violence, 99 percent male. So you know, it’s interesting to me that the elephant in the bathroom isn’t acknowledged; you can’t come to grips with it. ... If you frame the problem incorrectly, you’re not going to solve it.”

Personally, Rice had good role models, both male and female, in her family. Her mother was a science teacher and her father a colonel in the US Air Force. But she has strong advice for women who might not have been so lucky.

“We were brought up to be independent and to defend ourselves. So if no one has given you permission, just take the permission. Take the permission to live your life on your terms. That doesn’t mean living your life like I live mine; it means giving yourself the freedom and the permission to claim what you want and then do it,” she said. “And don’t worry about what other people think; just do what you need to do to fulfill who you are. And if you don’t know who you are, then work on that.”

Rice has been similarly fearless and outspoken in her political opinions, but she emphatically said she has no interest in pursuing a career in that arena. “I could never be a politician. I won’t raise money.”

She finds the corruption of democracy so bad that she compared the system to a brothel. Her regular commentary on public radio’s “The Tavis Smiley Show” clearly puts her on the side of activists. Some of the top 10 lists she has recited on the show included 10 ways to lose the war on terror and 10 things Condoleezza Rice didn’t say in her testimony about the US response to terrorism before and after Sept. 11.

However, Rice has plenty of affection for the secretary of state, a second cousin she met a little more than 10 years ago.

“I admire Condoleezza. I just think she’s hanging around the wrong crew right now,” she said laughing. “Bush is making her look bad. She makes him look good though. Thank God she’s there, or we would have invaded Syria by now [laughs]. Good grief. No, I know she stopped it, she’s the reason that there’s any diplomacy whatsoever. We would have invaded Syria and Iran by now if Cheney and Rumsfeld had their way; they’re both crazy. So I see her as a very smart, stabilizing influence in a den of nuts in the White House.”

Though she has no political aspirations, the 50-year-old Rice pointed out an interesting facet of her current position: It requires what she calls “United Nations skills” in dealing with racial issues across the spectrum.

Though she believes that “tremendous progress has been made” in race relations and social justice, there is still a long struggle ahead. So in addition to working on police reform and overseeing school construction after launching a coalition lawsuit that won $750 million, Advancement Project is currently devoting its energies to healing racial strife. It has been helping the Muslim community protect its people and houses of worship since Sept. 11 and dealing with the worsening problems of gang violence.

Rice, whose ancestry is Native American, African and Scotch-Irish, has flawless light brown skin. Her family is directly descended from “slave owners and slaves and the Native Americans came in on the great-great level, so we’re 19th-century American blended.

“And the problem with that is people forget you’re not all of one or the other, so you don’t really belong to one or the other,” she added. “I mean, I am African-American, and that’s my home base, but I am very fluid and fluent and have the passports to go into all these other worlds.”

Rice previously worked with LA County Sheriff Lee Baca to find solutions for the race-related violence affecting the Pitchess Detention Center and implemented NFL Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown’s Amer-I-Can skills management program. But she still sees racial tension on the streets and in the jails intensifying.

“It was bad enough that the violence was by set or by sect or by gang. Now, you’re starting to have African Americans and Latinos shoot each other just on the basis of race, and that’s ridiculous. So I see the floor sinking, the dynamics getting worse in the underclass and in the prisons. You almost have to have racially segregated facilities — it’s that tense.”

Compounding the problem, Rice explained, is the shrinking middle class and the lack of jobs for unskilled workers. She fears we have written off the poor, and that can only lead to disaster.

“We’re going to become like a lot of Third World capitals: a city of haves and have-nots,” she warned. “We have a mass incarceration strategy. We just decided the folks at the bottom are never going to make it to the table, and we have jail for them. We have more people in prison than any other industrialized country in the world, including South Africa, and California is the capital for that nonsense. … So if you don’t fix it now, you will basically turn the ship of state on a permanent trajectory toward Rio, and beyond Rio is Mogadishu.”

While Rice can envision the worst, she has the courage to fight for a brighter reality. Advancement Project is one organization willing to invest in the community that our society would leave behind, both locally and nationally through its Washington, DC, office. Over the past nine months, it has been developing a plan for gang activity reduction in Los Angeles that will insist that all the city’s programs — from law enforcement to the schools — communicate with each other and work together, something entirely new to the system.

“We keep doing the same thing, and we have more gangs, so it’s a real sign of insanity,” Rice said. “So one of the biggest things that I’m working on right now is helping the city assess why we’re stuck on stupid. We’ve got a lot of people doing very good work, but it’s not to scale; it’s not based on best practices; it’s not based on research.”

As long as we leave behind a whole sector of our population and let government exist “to perpetuate power, to reinforce the structures of party and to distribute disproportionate public wealth to private interests,” Rice believes we cannot have a true constitutional democracy.

“Our mission is to create a trajectory toward increasing the middle class, increasing upward mobility, increasing prosperity,” she said, “because the more prosperous an economic region is, the less friction, the less tension, the less crime, the less racial strife. That’s the key.”

To learn more about Constance Rice and Advancement Project, visit www.advancementproject.org.