Constance Rice to Headline MLK Luncheon
Nationally known legal action advocate Constance L. Rice will be the keynote speaker at KCBA's annual Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Luncheon on Friday, January 13.
Co-director 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, Rice is known for her work fighting inequality and exclusion. She has received more than 50 major awards for her fight to expand opportunity and advance 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 of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals and worked at Morrison & Foerster as a litigation associate. In 1991, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and became co-director of its 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 be spent to improve the bus system. 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 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's 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's public schools.
California LawBusiness named her as one of California's top 10 most influential lawyers in October 2000. She received the 2001 Peace Prize from the California Wellness Foundation and the 2002 John Anson Ford Human-itarian Award from Los Angeles County. In May 2003, Rice received an honorary doctor of law degree from Occidental College and in September 2004 she received the Women Lawyers of Los Angeles Ernestine Stahlhut Award. She is a regular commentator on the "Tavis Smiley Show" and has appeared on "60 Minutes," the "Lehrer News Hour," "Nightline," the "Oprah Winfrey Show," "This Week" and "Politically Incorrect."
