A Pain In The Power Structure’s Rear

On a spring evening in 1998, Genethia Hayes, executive director of the L.A. chapter of the Southern Christian Conference, called civil rights attorney Connie Rice at her downtown office and roared, “You get your high yellow ass down here and bring that wonderful white woman you run with!” Moments earlier, Barbara Boudreaux had told Hayes that if she wanted to open her mouth about how L.A.’s public schools should be run, she’d have to take away Boudreaux’s seat on the Los Angeles Unified School District board. Livid, Hayes turned to Rice, the woman she would most want beside her in battle--especially one over education.

* To the city’s power brokers, Rice is a quixotic force of nature, as hard to define as she is to ignore, the prime mover in collaborative lawsuits against all the usual suspect acronyms: LAPD, MTA, DWP, LAUSD. Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU in Los Angeles, calls her a cross between civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Says L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, “Connie is not only a thorn in the side of the power structures of Los Angeles, but a jewel in the crown.” To Hayes, Rice was simply a friend who is not averse to a good fight. As Rice herself puts it: “You don’t tell women like us, ‘Take my seat.’ Because we will.”

The board race soon degenerated into ethnic infighting and general nastiness, but with the help of “that wonderful white woman”--Rice’s law partner, Molly Munger--and the backing of Mayor Richard Riordan, Hayes snatched Boudreaux’s seat out from under her, later parlaying her victory into the presidency of a board whose newly elected majority has pledged sweeping change. Now Rice, 44, is waiting for the revolution. She’s not waiting patiently.

In March, the Advancement Project, a public-policy legal action organization that Rice and Munger helped create, joined a coalition of civic groups, including MALDEF, to file a lawsuit against the State Allocations Board, charging that the board funds school building projects based on how quickly districts file applications rather than how desperate they are for new buildings--”speed over need.” On Aug. 24, a superior court judge sided with the coalition and ordered the state to come up with a way to allocate funding based on need. But Rice says she has just begun to fight. LAUSD itself is the most overcrowded district in the state, and if the district continues to drag its feet in building schools and implementing change, she may wind up doing battle again--this time against the “reform” board she helped elect. Should that happen, Rice thinks Hayes will understand. Although the two say they are sisters and plan to sit on each other’s porches during their golden years, Rice says she has no intention of whiling away the hours talking “ ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda,’ while the children of Los Angeles still can’t read.”

*

SOMETHING TO KNOW ABOUT CONNIE RICE: SHE MEASURES ONLY 5 FEET, 6 INCHES, but she’s been told she seems more like 6-foot-1. This illusion may stem from a growth in self-image that began when she was a freshman at Harvard, a time when she’d never dated and didn’t know the decorum (still doesn’t, she says). When a fellow student hounded her to go out with him, she finally said: “Why would I go out with you? You’re domineering, and you’re insecure about being short.” The man beat her, breaking her nose. Haunted by her inability to fight back, she began studying tae kwon do. After graduating in 1978 with a degree in government, she earned her black belt and went on to become a national champion. “It took three years to remake myself so that in a male world I would feel safe enough to exercise power,” she says. “I stopped the Mary Tyler Moore act and became Murphy Brown on Viagra.”

Studying martial arts freed her from certain gender expectations and lent support to a theory she had developed: “In general, men are afraid of being embarrassed and women are afraid of being killed. Once you’ve beaten a man in the ring, well, that mythology is gone. You mean I can kick their asses, too? I became fearless, and I never looked at men the same way again.”

That confidence persists. For example, because she travels frequently, she has taken it upon herself to instruct men how to sit in airplane seats. “Women are taught to take up as little space as possible, while men claim their own space as a birthright.” On one recent trip, she pointed out to the man seated beside her that he was using both armrests and that his leg had drifted into her space. She told him to move over. He was shocked. “It wasn’t anything personal. I was teaching him how to contain his body.”

If Rice ever writes her autobiography, she says she’ll title it “Plain Colored Girl,” what a boy with his own lack of decorum once called her when she expressed interest in him. The great-granddaughter of Alabama slaves, Rice defines herself as “American blended” or a “walking Rorschach test,” with her ancestral bloodlines of African, Native American, Scottish, Irish and Italian. (“There’s no way I could turn out this color unless there was some miscegenation going on way back.”) Her greatest strength, she says, is taking the cultural temperature of a place. She credits this to her life as a nomad.

Rice’s father was a colonel and pilot in the Air Force, and Rice and her two younger brothers followed their parents from base to base, moving almost every year. “My mother is a genius. She made it seem like an adventure.” No matter where they went, their homes were full of books and her father’s Duke Ellington, Keith Jarrett and Miles Davis albums. They were allowed to watch one television program a week but as much news as their hearts desired. The children in the Rice family were loved with “an exuberant cherishing” and “incredibly high expectations,” she says.

Rice thinks of her grandmother as a CEO. “She cooked three meals a day for 10 kids. Think about that--with no modern appliances, wringing chickens’ necks, raising string beans!” Her grandmother taught her a powerful lesson. “I was always made very aware of the people who came before me,” Rice says. “My other grandmother called it a relay race, and the baton was being passed to me to carry on the fight for civil rights.”

Rice figures she was born “hard-wired for social justice.” At age 5, after a trip to the Cleveland Zoo, she tried to get her brother to help her free the lions. “Most normal kids love the zoo,” she laughs, “but I was completely traumatized. They probably should have gotten me therapy.”

Rice’s mother is a retired chemistry and biology teacher. She taught her children how to read by age 3. When she visited the homes of her students, she was known to say: “I’ll tell you why your child is not learning. Turn off the idiot box and get this child a desk so he can study.” Rice’s brothers are both doctors. “My younger brother is the normal one with a wife and two kids,” she says. “My middle brother and I are from the same bolt of cloth. We’re both nerds. I’m a hermit on the hill. I mean, I love humanity, but I have no pretenses to being a woman of the people.”

Rice waves a family phone directory that has “HQS” next to her parents’ number. “We’re all in the outposts, but they are ‘Headquarters.’ ” Despite such signs of continuing parental influence, Rice has, by all indications, always had a mind of her own. Moving around, she says, helped her steer clear of the “social cues” of what people expected of a girl. A tomboy who loved climbing trees, she once wiggled out of being included in a coming-out party by threatening to shave her head and wear combat boots.

Today Rice is sometimes confused for her second cousin, Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush’s foreign affairs advisor. But unlike Condoleeza, this Rice says she is neither Republican nor Democrat. “I want what works. I don’t particularly care if the reactionary Republicans or the Communists have a good idea. I don’t care. “

It was while she was attending New York University law school on a scholarship that her activism accelerated and her beliefs developed. While studying contract and property law, she concluded that “property is power in this country--real-estate agents steer people to certain neighborhoods,” leading to segregated communities. She began working at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. There Rice met her mentor, controversial voting-rights theoretician Lani Guinier (in 1993, President Clinton nominated and then withdrew Guinier to be the first African American head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division).

Rice spent her last year of law school working on a death row case in Georgia. That case, she says, remains closest to her heart. The facts: A young black man named Billy Moore had been accused of killing one of his buddy’s uncles while they were on a drunken spree. Moore’s attorney, a friend of the judge, urged his client to plead guilty so as to avoid a complicated trial. “Billy pled guilty,” says Rice, “and three minutes later, the judge sentenced him to death.” Rice and a colleague carried a typewriter to the home of each witness and took declarations. At every step, Rice says, they were trailed by a Georgia sheriff who warned “that we were in his territory, and if we so much as crossed a solid line on the pavement, he would land on us.” The 1,000-page clemency petition that Rice and her colleague produced included letters from the victim’s family saying that Moore was innocent. Georgia’s clemency board released him in 1989.

After law school, Rice worked as a law clerk for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Damon J. Keith. He calls her “a superstar who is not afraid to leave the comfort zone and go into the eye of the storm.” Rice was assigned to a sexual harassment lawsuit against an industrial oil refinery, and Keith gave her freedom to dig into the issues. The case was an eye-opener. The accused supervisor, she says, kept a statue on his desk of a woman on her back with a golf ball between her breasts while a golfer stood over her yelling, “Fore!” as indicated by a brass plate. Rice saw it as a “seventh-grade level of humor.” Two of the judges reviewing the case said that that behavior and similar behavior reflected in the evidence did not constitute harassment, Rice says.

“The judges were using a fictional ‘objective man’ to evaluate a woman’s sensitivity,” she says, laughing. She helped Keith write a dissent that advocated establishing “a reasonable woman’s standard” to replace the prevailing “reasonable man’s standard.” And lower courts later referred to “the reasonable woman’s standard.”

In 1990, Rice began working for the Legal Defense Fund in Los Angeles. In one of her first major cases she and colleagues sued Los Angeles’ housing authority for allegedly letting cross-racial violence flare in city housing projects. The authority, Rice argued, had refused an emergency transfer to allow the Zuniga family to move from Jordan Downs after African Americans in the project repeatedly threatened them. Three days after their transfer was rejected, an arson fire killed five family members. A year later, Latinos in Ramona Gardens attacked a black family.

Rice had already been working with gang members in the projects, and she and her co-counsel began trying to help racially isolated families, at one point even asking members of the Grape Street Crips to escort Latino families through the projects. In the end, the housing authority settled and set up a framework for providing safe environments. “Connie always understood that when you’re protecting minorities, you’re protecting everybody,” says civil rights attorney Barry Litt. “What is one day a majority may another day be a minority.”

Rice since has involved herself in a spectrum of cases, including the unsuccessful fight to defend affirmative action against Prop. 209 (she and her defense fund boss, Elaine Jones, met in Washington, D.C., with Gen. Colin L. Powell, gaining his public support) to assisting attorney Johnnie L. Cochran in springing Black Panther Geronimo Pratt, who had been wrongly incarcerated 27 years for murder. Cochran also turned to Rice for help in representing Rene Rodriguez, a Riverside police officer who complained of receiving threats after he spoke out against fellow cops in the death of Tyisha Miller, the African American teenager who was shot by police in her car. “I said, ‘You gotta take care of this guy, Connie,’ and of course, she did,” says Cochran. Police reform followed. “She was my friend first and my lawyer second,” says Rodriguez. “She took it personally.”

So, apparently, do many of Rice’s opponents, especially fellow African Americans. Barbara Boudreaux refused to comment for this story. So did Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who had backed Boudreaux in the school board race. So did Los Angeles County Supervisor and MTA board member Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who locked horns with Rice when Rice successfully sued the MTA to put more buses on the streets.

The people who will comment on Rice can be bluntly critical. Councilman Nate Holden, for instance, lumps her with the “hypocrites” who take certain cases for the money. But others seem compelled to temper their attacks. Ward Connerly, Prop. 209’s most high-profile proponent, says Rice was the person he least liked to debate. “She has a very smooth and disarming style, and then while you’re caught off-guard, she bangs you over the head with a two-by-four.” Libertarian talk-show host Larry Elder says, “Connie is probably the brightest liberal I’ve ever confronted. All the more reason why I think it’s tragic that she’s so wrongheaded about so many important issues such as school vouchers and race- and gender-based affirmative action.”

*

A FRAMED POSTER OF THE PLAY “FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf” hangs behind Rice’s cluttered desk near a stack of tae kwon do medals. She gazes at heaps of files. “I don’t have a secretary, but I know where everything is,” she says. “If I were organized, I’d be dangerous.”

Until education in the state reaches Rice’s expectations, it’s likely the files will only loom larger. What incensed Rice about the State Allocation Board’s approach to school funding is that money was earmarked for projected “phantom” students in surburban regions while “living” urban children sit on the floor or go outside to use a portable toilet. “There is a constant pattern of underfunding and overcrowding of the poorest kids,” says David Abel of New Schools/Better Neighborhoods, an L.A.-based organization. “Connie has taken the lead in seeing that the rights of all students be served.”

The fact that the state was ordered to come up with a new way to allocate funds substantially advanced the school buildings cause, education advocates say. Still, Rice laments the “aggressive incompetence” she sees at the local as well as state level. She says that, for years, while working with Hayes and others on projects geared toward education reform--LEARN, LAAMP--she has watched the district decompose. The problem? “It’s the contracts, stupid,” she says. The previous boards “wanted to get contracts for their friends. It was never about the kids.”

Rice’s verdict is still out on the new superintendent, Roy Romer. “If he can listen, get an interracial IQ that works with the Latino leadership, get a good dynamic with Sacramento going, and get a Marshall Plan for building these schools started, he’ll be a good choice. Those are a lot of ifs.”

Rice is adamant that public schools are a social necessity, that nothing will ever replace them--including vouchers. But she will not automatically dismiss any chance for improving students’ education. “I can’t look at poor white, Hmong, black and brown kids, and say they can’t use vouchers,” she says.

At the same time, Rice is impatient with the middle-class parents who clamor for their children’s public schools to resist some of the stopgap measures being imposed by a woefully overcrowded district--such as the multi-track schedule onto which the board is pushing high schools and that cuts 17 days out of each student’s school year. “If all people can think about is ‘my child’--who is actually a hundred times better off than the kids who sit on the floor and don’t have books--where’s the concern for those children?”

Still, like so many of the city’s middle- and upper-class parents (including most of the people with the most impact on public policy in Los Angeles, from elected officials to journalists), Rice says that if she had a child, she would not send her to an LAUSD school “unless it was competitive with top private schools like Harvard Westlake.”

*

RICE WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE CHILDREN, SHE SAYS. But the workplace, she adds, hasn’t caught up with the need for high-quality child care. And while she suggests that mothers who choose to stay home be compensated, her own domesticity stretches about as far as owning a microwave. At Munger’s insistence, she finally replaced the silk plant in a kitchen alcove with a stove. But weeks later, when her mother visited and went to use it, Rice had to shriek, “Stop! You’re going to burn the house down. My phone books are in there.”

She has been talking a long time when Munger pokes her head into the room and announces, “Enough. It’s lunchtime.” As Munger drives to New Moon restaurant, Rice calls out orders: “Don’t get behind that bus. Take 8th Street. Slow down. Stop. There’s the best parking lot. Pull in. There’s a space. Stop. Molly! OK. It’s really hot. Crack the windows.”

Later, in the parking garage at Rice’s office, a security guard motions us over to look at a stunned lizard that’s crept in through the pipes. “Wait!” Rice says. “What are you going to do with it?” The guard mimes an ax chop. “Like hell you are,” Rice says as Munger wails, “No, Connie! Forget it!” Rice demands a box, helps the guard scoop the lizard into it, and somehow Rice makes sure the reptile goes home with the reporter who has been shadowing her.

Those who know Rice best think her goal is to rescue all the children of LAUSD, or die trying. And woe unto whoever slows the charge. Musing about the current “reform” school board, she says, “I have access to Genethia, but she doesn’t listen to me. I love her like a sister, but she is the most bullheaded, stubborn woman.” She raises a teacup to her lips and takes a sip. “Genethia will tell you, ‘Connie will sue me in a minute,’ and I will. Our takeover of the board was our last insider strategy. If this doesn’t transform the culture so that all children are performing, then it will be lawsuits next. It’s a struggle for California’s soul.”