Passion for Causes Shapes Life of ACLU’s Ripston : Rights: After the riots she questioned herself. Then she renewed 30-year drive to help improve people’s lives.

A year ago, as Los Angeles exploded during the riots, it was a watershed time for Ramona Ripston.

Publicly, the head of the local American Civil Liberties Union decried the not guilty verdicts in the first Rodney G. King beating trial, sought a federal civil rights trial of the four police officers involved and called for the resignation of then-Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Privately, she was questioning herself. Having spent 30 years on causes she felt would improve people’s lives, from school integration to voting rights to police reform, she wondered if her efforts had been for naught. As she saw parts of the city burning, and sensed the rage in the streets, “it felt as though a large part of my life had been futile,” she said.

But a year later, the passion that has driven Ripston’s life--and with it ACLU’s Southern California affiliate--has prevailed. Now she still focuses on police reform, along with free assembly rights for gang members, and the constitutional rights of students who are searched for weapons with metal detectors.

Ripston has brushed aside her doubts, as she did in 1972, when she first came to head the local ACLU office, housed at that time above a wig store and coffee shop. A stranger to Los Angeles, she wondered if she could lead the group when she knew almost no one, and few knew her.

Today the affiliate is the largest in the country, with its own building on Beverly Boulevard, and an annual budget that has grown from $200,000 to $2.6 million. And Ripston, a former housewife who has been married five times, has become one of the region’s best-known advocates of individual rights.

Ripston’s story is emblematic of many women from the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, who went beyond traditional roles, as she put it, “to finally do what I believed.”

Hers is the face the ACLU presents to the public, a persuasive, tenacious and unwavering fighter--whether against the military’s ban on gay soldiers or government denial of emergency food stamps to Los Angeles riot victims.

She was hired at a time when the ACLU and its board of directors were mostly white males--one of whom asked how she could manage the job and still raise her three children. Ripston made it clear from the beginning, she said, that her priorities were “race, poverty and equality issues for women”--inside and outside the ACLU. Her staff is 61% female and 56% minority. Half the board members are female and one-third are minorities.

Ripston runs one of the 53 affiliates and chapters that make up the ACLU’s national organization. Among its major accomplishments was a joint challenge with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund to Los Angeles County’s supervisorial district boundaries. That led to redistricting and the election of the first Latino supervisor, Gloria M. Molina.

The Southern California affiliate is considered a maverick that readily takes positions contrary to the national organization, such as its call last year for a second trial in the King case. That position ran counter to the national ACLU’s policy against double jeopardy.

Under Ripston’s direction, the local has been a leader in pushing the national organization--formed in 1920 primarily to defend free speech--to expand its mission.

The Southern California local “has been in the forefront to redefine civil liberties in a much broader way, not just to be concerned with freedom of expression but areas of equality,” said James Kushner, a professor at Southwestern University School of Law. “Much of that can be traced to Ramona.”

Whittier law professor Mary Ellen Gale, a member of the local and national boards, said board members set policy, the attorneys litigate the cases, but “it is Ramona who drives the agenda.”

Though not a lawyer, Ripston can expound like one. One day in her office, she made clear her concerns over the metal detectors the Los Angeles Unified School District is using to find weapons carried by students.

ACLU monitors had noticed a seeming lack of standardized procedures, she told school board member Jeff Horton, and worried that certain students may be unfairly targeted for searches. “There’s a delicate balance between the 4th Amendment and privacy rights,” she said. “We are not looking to litigate this issue.”

While Ripston tries to build support for her views by forming community coalitions, holding news conferences or public forums, the threat of court action is her biggest weapon. The local affiliate is pursuing 106 cases.

But Ripston also has her staff research solutions. With Horton, she suggested that the school district use mediation services to resolve student conflicts.

The atmosphere in her office seemed all business, but she conducted it on tables that looked more like dining room than office furniture.

Dressed in a tailored outfit, with shoulder-length blonde hair framing her face, she looked younger than her 66 years. Ripston has for a long time shaved years off her age, but now says: “I guess I should be a role model and show you can be as old as I am and still look OK, and be doing interesting things.”

She is known for her sense of timing.

After the videotaped beating of King was first aired in 1991, civil rights attorney Samuel Paz remembers getting a call from Ripston the next day. Paz, an ACLU board member, had won large judgments for clients who sued over police misconduct.

“In a trembling voice, she said: ‘I think we have to act,’ ” recalled Paz. “There was a major press conference, held at the ACLU. She brought together the black, Latino and Asian leadership, so the communities could demand this kind of conduct cease. She said to me: ‘I’m not asking you to be at this press conference. I’m telling you. You’ll be there.’ ”

Trying to galvanize public opinion, Ripston had the ACLU place a newspaper advertisement, reading: “Who do you call when the gang wears blue?--the ACLU,” and called for a commission to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department. “We were saying the same thing for 25 years,” Ripston said, but now she was convinced people would listen.

Gates, ultimately forced into retirement in part because of the furor Ripston helped to generate, calls her “Ramona the ripper.”

Born and raised in New York City, Ripston reached her $90,000-a-year job through activist involvement in the 1960s and work for the ACLU’s national office and its New York and New Jersey affiliates.

There was a one-year break in her 21 years with the Southern California ACLU when she took a job in 1986 with People for the American Way, a lobbying group formed to counter the religious right. Joyce S. Fiske, an ACLU board member and friend of Ripston’s, was not surprised when she soon returned.

“She got this wonderful offer for more money and seemingly less stress,” Fiske said. “But I knew the desire to have a quiet life, more regular hours, wasn’t what Ramona would like in the end.”

An acknowledged workaholic, Ripston regularly works 10- to 15-hour days, overseeing a staff of 41. Past and present employees describe her as warm and compassionate, but demanding. She also has a temper.

“She sets the pace. If you can’t keep up, then you’ve got to get stepping,” said Joe Hicks, who worked at the ACLU before heading the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

She involves herself in staff problems “like a matriarch,” said former ACLU communications director Linda Burstyn. For two attorneys who hate each other, she set up separate areas of autonomy so they could coexist. When some women staffers accused a male colleague of being sexist and dismissive, Ripston brought in a counselor--who happened to be a board member--to talk it out.

“Most nonprofits are like large dysfunctional families,” Hicks said. “It’s tough to bring all these individuals together and get them working toward a singular goal. She pulled that off very well.”

Ripston is the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish mother and a physics professor who was Roman Catholic. She said she was raised to be aware of inequality and discrimination. Ripston thought she was going to be an actress, a veterinarian or a teacher. Instead, she became a model after graduating from Hunter College in 1948, and soon married.

She claims she never felt conventional, noting that she never learned to type and never changed her last name when she married. “I always felt strongly about that. Of course, I didn’t know I’d be married so many times, so that turned out to be a good thing.”

She evolved from housewife into a self-reliant activist as she moved through each marriage.

With her first marriage, to an accountant studying law, Ripston found herself in a suburban Long Island tract home with a baby, not fitting in. She moved in with her parents and returned to work doing marketing for a lingerie company. Her second husband was the company’s owner.

This marriage put her in a well-to-do neighborhood, with a nanny taking care of three children while she pursued volunteer work. Eventually, she started giving her time to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Ira Glasser, now head of the national ACLU, said he heard of her then as a “woman driving a convertible red Cadillac in a mink coat and blond tresses. Not exactly the image of Ramona the political activist one sees today.”

She was offered a job for $5,000 a year at the New York Civil Liberties Union in 1965. “My then-husband did not want me to take it,” Ripston recalled. “I think he knew if I figured out I could support myself I would leave. And that’s what happened.”

She edited a newsletter, raised funds, organized new chapters and was caught up by the civil liberties issues raised by draft resistance or flag burning during the Vietnam War. Her next husband was Hank Di Suvero, an activist ACLU lawyer.

When the top ACLU job in Los Angeles opened up in 1972, she wanted it. “All my working life I had helped some man run something,” she said. “I was always writing the speeches, doing a lot of the work, and they were always getting the credit.”

Di Suvero moved West with her, but their marriage foundered because of her long workdays and what she called her demands for “equality of tasks at home. . . . I wasn’t willing to negotiate anymore.” She then married Stanley R. Malone Jr., a Superior Court judge who has since retired.

Her current husband, Stephen Reinhardt, a judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, is well-known in the legal world for his outspoken views. Although both moved in liberal circles, they did not know each other socially until about four years ago.

Before that, Ripston only thought of Reinhardt as the judge who once ruled against the ACLU in its fight to desegregate Los Angeles schools. She testified before him years ago, when he headed the Los Angeles Police Commission. “I didn’t think he was too responsive,” she said.

For his part, Reinhardt recalled: “I thought of her as a cold, aloof figure.” But he later was surprised by her warmth and sensitivity. He believes she takes criticism too much to heart. But Reinhardt added: “She hates it when I suggest she’s oversensitive.”

The local affiliate’s membership numbers more than 33,000 and has become known for controversial positions, not always popular in the communities they are meant to help. Recently the affiliate unsuccessfully fought a court injunction giving the city of Los Angeles sweeping powers to curtail Blythe Street gang members in Panorama City. The ACLU successfully challenged a Santa Monica ordinance to limit large homeless feeding programs in city parks.

In both cases, ACLU lawyers said constitutional rights of free speech and assembly were endangered. Critics in the communities said residents had a right to feel safe in their streets or parks. “I wish their focus was on what’s best for all people, but it’s not,” Santa Monica City Councilman Robert T. Holbrook said.

Ripston is used to that kind of reaction. “I don’t think the Constitution and safety are in conflict,” she said. “Political leaders are so anxious to come up with a solution that the Constitution seems some vague concept. People don’t understand what civil liberties and civil rights are.”

Profile: Ramona Ripston

* Born: Feb. 18, 1927

* Residence: Los Angeles

* Education: Hunter College, B.A., political science.

* Career highlights: Executive director, ACLU of Southern California since 1972, except for 1986-87, when she was West Coast director of People for the American Way. Also held various posts with the New York Urban Coalition, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National ACLU. Has also been a KABC radio talk show host.

* Interests: Civil rights and civil liberties, animals, tennis, reading crime novels.

* Family: Married five times, with three children, one grandchild.

* Quote: “There is this notion today that you can’t obey the Constitution and still have public safety. I don’t think the Constitution and safety are in conflict.”