THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Debt of Honor : Constance Rice was raised to believe that she should advance the cause of racial and economic justice. Now, as counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she’s doing it.

Constance Rice has done the math dozens of times, for all sorts of equations. Even though her numbers tell the same story every time, for the benefit of a visitor she repeats them, setting the figures off like depth charges.

Example: African American children make up only 9% of the state’s non-adult population but 40% of its juvenile prison population. Latinos make up another 39% of juvenile inmates.

Says Rice, her words heightened by a cool gaze and a quiet, almost droll delivery: “You might as well just put the crib in the cell.”

And last year, she says later, pointing to a plastic drawing board with a blue scrawl of numbers, the Metropolitan Transit Authority spent as little as 38 cents in subsidies on each of its bus riders, who make up 94% of its customers. The more affluent Metrolink passengers--the other 6%--received upward of $30 per person.

“Third World buses for Third World people,” Rice says.

To her mind, the MTA issue also neatly symbolizes the yawning chasm of race and class in Los Angeles, as well as government’s attitude toward poorer citizens. As Western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and in her role as a county Department of Water and Power commissioner, she is trying to bridge those often formidable divisions.

“There’s no other place in the U.S. that presents any more complex problems,” Rice says, sitting amid an agreeable clutter of books and documents in her Downtown LDF office. “This is where it’s at. What happens in L.A. in civil and economic rights is going to tell us whether we keep our constitutional democracy.”

Keeping that system alive and whole has kept Rice, 38, running for most of the last 20 years. From trying to win a stay of execution for a Death Row inmate to filing suit against powerful institutions, a sense of mission imbues her life. It is a commitment so serious that she steadfastly refuses to comment on her private life, arguing that it might affect public opinion and diminish her ability to represent her clients.

“When Connie speaks, people listen,” says Lani Guinier, an early Rice mentor and ill-fated Clinton Administration nominee for assistant attorney general. “(Her work) is not just a legal exercise. It’s a commitment to doing justice. She has a moral vision without being ideological.”

DWP Commission President Dennis A. Tito agrees: “I couldn’t think of a better person to lead (her) fight.”

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The emphasis on doing, and doing well, was imparted by her mother, a schoolteacher, and her father, an Air Force officer. “She’d work us so hard in the summer,” Rice says of her mother, “that school was a break.”

An itinerant military life allowed Rice an unusual perspective on race and class, she says. By her count, she attended four high schools, two middle schools and three grade schools, bouncing from Texas to North Carolina to California to London to Japan and back again. She finally graduated from a high school in San Antonio.

At each stop, Rice recalls, she and her two younger brothers would face several hurdles relating to their minority status in usually all-white schools.

The first was socialization: “You had to learn how to break the ice quickly and reach people,” Rice says. “You were the ones to make people feel comfortable. You had to make white people feel comfortable.”

The second involved guidance counselors’ disinclination to place the Rice children in college-prep classes. That would prompt a calm visit from a determined Mrs. Rice, who would insist on advanced classes, a battle she always won. “We would have been tracked into mediocrity if not for her,” Rice recalls. Her illiterate grandfather had been similarly strict, making sure that all 10 of his children went to college.

The Rices were also schooled in life’s expectations, and that meant using their education to advance the cause of racial and economic justice. “It got passed on to us,” Rice says, “that you had to be one of the people paying back, one of the people trying to open doors rather than resting on your laurels. I’m still paying back that debt.”

Both of her brothers are now physicians, and crusaders in their work as well, Rice says half-jokingly. A cousin, Condoleezza Rice, became the provost at Stanford University after serving as President George Bush’s special assistant for national security affairs.

When it came time for college, Constance Rice planned to major in communications at Northwestern University, in hopes of becoming a television newscaster. But her father brought home a Radcliffe application and made her fill it out. She sent it off and promptly forgot about it until receiving an acceptance notice. Only then did she learn she was bound for an academically rigorous women’s college.

Upon arrival in Boston, though, a chagrined Rice discovered that she actually had been admitted to the newly co-ed Harvard. “I cried for two weeks because I didn’t want to be there,” she recalls. “I’m probably the only one in the history of Harvard to feel that way.”

Her experiences didn’t warm her to the campus either. At the time, in the mid-’70s, the city was embroiled in a school desegregation battle that included assaults by anti-busing foes on Harvard’s black women students. And Rice recalls another sobering encounter: She wandered into a biology lab one day to find a life-sized replica of an African man in a glass cage.

“When I was at Harvard, I never felt blacker in my life,” Rice says. “It was never an issue until I went there. It was a hostile environment in which to learn. Everything about you was under siege.”

College provided other life-defining moments as well. In her freshman year, after a male acquaintance with whom she had been arguing beat her up, Rice got into the martial arts with a vengeance. “If my words could evoke that type of reaction, I needed some protection,” she says.

Several years later, after receiving her degree in government, she had not only earned her black belt in tae kwon do and fought in regional exhibitions--including one at Madison Square Garden--but also won a silver medal in the 1981 national championships.

Although no longer in championship form, Rice credits her martial arts training with giving her the fearlessness her work demands. “It gave me complete entitlement to my environment,” she says. “I could not accept constraints and do what I had to do.”

After a few years spent running Harvard’s minority recruitment program, Rice’s sense of purpose led her to New York University law school, where she hoped to specialize in public interest law. There, too, she tangled with the politics of the institution.

Despite stellar grades, Rice refused to participate in law review and instead volunteered at the local LDF office. Her apparent snub brought on the enmity of the administration and faculty members, who later wrote her only halfhearted recommendations for post-graduate clerkships, she says. Rice was thinking of suing the school when she received a prestigious Federal Appeals Court clerkship, won partly through Guinier’s endorsement and partly through Rice’s point-blank request for the job.

“I had to do an end run around the institution, which is what African Americans often have to do,” she says.

After two years with a big San Francisco firm “to see what it was like,” Rice in 1986 became a special assistant to the vice chancellor at UCLA, trouble-shooting on issues of race, admissions and money, among other things. But four years later, when the job opened at the Western LDF office, she decided to re-enter the social advocacy arena.

“If you wanted to do (public interest law), there was no higher calling than this,” she says. “This was Thurgood Marshall’s law firm.”

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That calling comes with a price. Preserving the Constitution can be an exhausting and relatively low-paying job. Earning about the same wage as a paralegal in a big law firm, Rice says, she and four other attorneys often put in stretches of 16-hour days in preparing major cases. What the LDF wants is nothing less than institutional transformation.

Founded 55 years ago by Marshall and Charles Houston, the LDF has been credited by many with effectively desegregating the nation. (Although still attached to the NAACP in name, the LDF broke ties with the organization more than 30 years ago and is commonly known as the Fund.)

“I’m not interested in hearts and minds,” Rice says. “You can hate Latinos, women and blacks. You can do that under the First Amendment. What you’re not free to do is to take these beliefs and make policies that put barriers in peoples’ lives.”

Only six years old, the LDF office in Los Angeles was established as a laboratory, as Rice puts it, to grapple with the future of civil rights. Its counterparts in New York and Washington, D.C., pursue more traditional civil right agendas.

The constant press for resources requires Rice and associates to focus on the big picture, litigating when they see injustices with the potential to do the most damage to the most people. “She’s an extraordinary advocate,” Abby J. Leibman of the California Women’s Law Center says of Rice.

It also means firing solitary shots against sometimes elephantine targets.

Last July, when the MTA sought to implement a 25-cent bus fare increase and eliminate monthly passes for unlimited ridership on the agency’s 1,900 buses, the LDF perceived a fundamental injustice that went beyond simple fare hikes.

“This is the vehicle to showcase racial and class inequity in the ‘90s, and every other (public interest law firm) said, ‘No,’ ” to taking the case, Rice says.

The proposals amount to “the poor subsidizing the rich,” she says, because the agency’s commuter trains ferry a relatively affluent ridership that is the beneficiary of nearly 80% of MTA’s local transit resources. And just before approving the fare increase designed to make up for an anticipated budget shortfall, the agency earmarked millions to build a Metrolink rail extension.

While the case runs its legal course, the MTA will not get its wish.

The LDF has also taken on the Los Angeles Police Department over its K-9 unit. In a one-year period, Rice says, the 16-officer unit racked up a use-of-force rate 10 times higher than the department as a whole and put more people--primarily blacks and Latinos--in the hospital than the LAPD’s 7,000 other officers combined. The department is now settling with the LDF on damages for the victims.

Such victories are sweet given the recent decade of retrenchment in civil rights litigation and the prevailing public sentiment against spending money or sympathy on the dispossessed, Rice says. That message has had a Malthusian impact, she believes, with the city’s poor unleashing their desperation and anger on one another.

As a result, Rice spends much of her time tending tenuous coalitions, ensuring that the LDF and other public advocacy groups, such as the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, remain united on large issues. That has meant mobilizing African Americans in the fight against Proposition 187 and supporting MALDEF in its efforts to bring Latino representation to largely Latino districts. And it has meant accepting an appointment to the DWP Commission two years ago--even after the City Council rejected her colleague Melanie Lomax for the post--to monitor the impact of environmental policy on the poor.

It is an arduous task. “The level of fighting, fear and animosity makes it very difficult to push a multicultural agenda (in this city),” Rice says. “But we can’t afford to look at each other as the enemy. We’re not friends, but we’re not enemies either.”

Although disappointed in the recent state election results in favor of Proposition 187 and Gov. Wilson, Rice vows to use them to her advantage, to “educate people on what I’m fighting against.”

In the short term, she expects that fight to get nastier. And she expects to raise her voice even higher and crunch even more numbers. Anything to avoid a social meltdown “that will make 1992 look like a picnic.”

“You can’t be part of the Legal Defense Fund and worry about what the mainstream wants,” Rice says. “If the mainstream had its way, we’d still be picking cotton. Thurgood Marshall was quite clear--you were supposed to be a policy engineer here, a social engineer. If you were a regular lawyer, you were just protecting the status quo.”

Constance Rice

Age: 38.

Native?: No. Born in Washington, D.C., lives in the Hollywood Hills.

Hobbies: Swimming, running, tae kwon do. Also, before she got too busy, photography, pottery and painting. “I used to be a halfway interesting person,” Rice jokes.

On why she doesn’t discuss her private life: “People need to perceive you in ways that diminish the scope of your work. And women are particularly subject to that. The strength of my professional persona is mine, and it’s not due to whomever I’m involved with or the children I have or don’t have. The integrity of my work doesn’t need to be matched to an imaginary private life. People are not capable of separating the two.”

On Los Angeles: “You’ve got every kind of human being known to woman here and there’s no mixing.”

On the price of color: “They have done surveys and asked white students, ‘How much would you have to be paid to be black?’ And they said, ‘A million dollars a year.’ So for people to pretend that they don’t know the price of color, I don’t buy it. Because when they’re asked, they can put a price on it.”