Ramona Ripston, who is stepping down as head of the ACLU of Southern California after almost forty years, is both a visionary who transformed the meaning of civil liberties and a dynamic and beloved figure on the LA left.
LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said she has had “an immeasurable impact on the City of Los Angeles… and beyond.” Stanley Sheinbaum, who headed the ACLU board that hired Ramona in 1972, remarked that from the beginning, “I was awestruck by her articulate understanding of the Constitution.” Hiring her, he said, “is probably the best judgment I’ve ever made.”
In a series of video tributes at the annual ACLU dinner in Los Angeles in December, Vanessa Redgrave called Ramona “a remarkable woman,” Maria Shriver called her “a fearless warrior” and Jesse Jackson said to her, “You never bowed, you never bent.” In a separate statement, Anthony Romero, executive director of the national ACLU, praised “her acute political instincts and fierce passion,” and noted that she was the first woman to be a leader of the ACLU.
Her most significant achievement, according to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Irvine, was expanding the practice of civil liberties law to include litigating for economic justice. Although the national ACLU has not yet adopted this principle, the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU-SC) fights not only for the freedoms in the Bill of Rights but also for the right of poor children to attend decent schools and for the rights of homeless people and immigrants. For Ramona, economic inequality is a civil liberties issue, because poverty undermines the exercise of all legal and political rights.
Exhibit No. 1 on Ramona’s list of legal victories combined a new litigation stance with some heartbreaking stories invovling the fight for better schools for poor children. California, which once had one of the best systems of public education in the country, has fallen to the bottom five states in money spent per student, and the state’s school population includes a million kids from poor families. In the Williams case (Williams v. California, 2000), the ACLU-SC and other groups showed that thousands of public school students did not have textbooks, that their teachers were unqualified and that kids refused to use the bathrooms because they were filthy and dangerous. It was the job of the state, the ACLU argued, to guarantee that all 6 million California public school students have the essentials of an education—even those from poor families.
The state’s Democratic governor at the time, Gray Davis, rejected that idea and paid $14 million in taxpayer money to an outside legal firm, O’Melveny & Myers, to fight Ramona and the ACLU. When Davis faced a recall election in 2003, challenger Arnold Schwarzenegger promised that, if elected, he would settle the Williams case. And he did.