Connie Rice

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Connie Rice Biography

Connie Rice of The Advancement Project talks to David Brancaccio about her views on the state of our nation with a focus on economic disparity.

Connie Rice, co-director of The Advancement Project, is known for her success in tackling problems of inequity and exclusion. She has received more than 50 major awards for her work in expanding opportunity and advancing multi-racial democracy.

Rice graduated from Harvard College in 1978. She won the Root Tilden Public Interest Scholarship to New York university School of Law, where she earned her law degree in 1984. After law school, she served as law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and worked at Morrison & Foerster as a litigation associate. In 1991, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and became co-director of LDF's Los Angeles Office in 1996.

As a litigator, Rice has filed class action civil rights cases redressing police misconduct, race and sex discrimination and unfair public policy in transportation, probation and public housing. She filed a landmark case on behalf of low-income bus riders that resulted in a mandate that more than 2 billion dollars be spent to improve the bus system. And in 1999, Rice launched a coalition lawsuit that won $750 million for new school construction in Los Angeles - money previously slated for less crowded, more affluent suburban school districts. In these and other cases, Rice has led multi-racial coalitions of lawyers and clients to win more than $4 billion worth of injunctive relief and damages.

In her non-litigation work in the 1990s, Rice served as counsel to the Watts gang truce and spearheaded a statewide campaign to save equal opportunity programs.

Mayors Tom Bradley and Richard Riordan appointed Rice to the governing board of Los Angeles' Department of Water and Power where she served as president and enacted contracting reforms and environmental advances. In 1998, Rice helped lead a successful campaign to place aggressive public school reformers on the governing board for Los Angeles' public schools.

In 1998, the LOS ANGELES TIMES designated her one of 24 leaders considered the "most experienced, civic-minded and thoughtful people on the subject of Los Angeles." And in October 2000, CALIFORNIA LAWBUSINESS named her, along with Governor Gray Davis and Warren Christopher, as one of California's top 10 most influential lawyers. In May 2003, Rice received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Occidental College.

Rice is a co-founder of The Advancement Project, a public policy and legal action group that supports organizations working to end community problems and address racial, class and other barriers to opportunity.


http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/rice.html

http://www.advancementproject.org/

Ironically, her 2nd cousin is Condi Rice. Good lord.