Connie Rice - Power Concedes Nothing: One Womans Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Courtroom to the Kill Zones

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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
POWER CONCEDES NOTHING

Writing with conviction, Connie Rice vividly portrays her lifes work and her unyielding commitment to our shared family valuesthe power of education, a dedication to improving the lives of others, and a belief that it does not matter where you came from; it matters where you are going.

Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. secretary of state

Connie Rices engrossing memoir, Power Concedes Nothing , is a story of a life dedicated to creating positive and lasting change in two of the most significant issues facing our society, civil rights and gang violence. Gandhi once said, to create change, you must become the change. There is nobody in America today who has brought so much positive change to these two issues as Connie. Her story is one of hope and optimism where so many others saw only despair and pessimism. Anyone who cares about democracy and its true potential needs to read this book.

William J. Bratton, former chief of police for the Los Angeles Police Department and former New York City police commissioner

Connie Rice is one of the few great progressive figures and voices whose love of poor people is visceral and whose commitment to justice is unstoppable. Dont miss this powerful story of a grand prophetic witness!

Cornel West, Princeton University

Essential reading for civic leaders, soldiers, and statesmen alike. One of our most thoughtful and dynamic leaders lays out how a holistic approach is required to address some of our nations most complex problems.

General Stanley A. McChrystal, retired

Connie Rice is the most brilliant legal mind Ive encountered in my twenty-year broadcast history. I hang on her every word. Tavis Smiley

From one of Americas most influential civil rights attorneys, Power Concedes Nothing is a hard-hitting memoir chronicling a fiercely dedicated womans quest to win the first of all human rights: freedom from violence.

CONNIE RICE has taken on school and bus systems, Death Row, the states of Mississippi and California, and the Los Angeles Police Departmentand won. Not just in court, where she vindicated major civil rights cases, but also on the streets and in prisons, where she spearheaded campaigns to reduce gang violence. Los Angeles magazine concluded that Connies work has picked up where Clarence Darrow left off.

In her extraordinary memoir, Rice chronicles her odyssey, the people who inspired her, and the teams she forged with allies and former foes. She counts among her partners LAPD police chiefs William Bratton and Charlie Beck, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, and gang interventionists such as Darren Bo Taylor.

Ricesecond cousin of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Ricewrites of being the greatgranddaughter of former slaves and slave owners who prized the aggressive pursuit of knowledge. Even her U.S. Air Force childhood, with seventeen moves across three continents, could not disrupt this family legacy of voracious accomplishment.

After joining the NAACP Legal Defense Funds West Coast office in 1990, Rice left the courtroom and took to the streets of the kill zones in the wake of the cataclysmic LAPD beating of Rodney King in 1991. What she learned from the invisible poor of underground Los Angeles would change her mission forever.

In her trek through gangland, Rice discovers that if you bury the underclass, you imperil yourselfa warning that her allies from law enforcement and the military strongly endorse.

Provocative and passionate, studded with dramatic episodes from the trenches of impact litigation and Americas most dangerous neighborhoods, Power Concedes Nothing is the story of an indomitable woman who knows that, without a demand, power concedes nothing.

CONNIE RICE has received more than fifty major awards for her leadership and unorthodox approaches to challenging brutality and reversing the raw deal for kids struggling to survive in the thin soil of poverty. She is a graduate of Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges and New York University School of Law. At her organization, Advancement Project (www.AdvancementProjectca.org), she continues her crusade for basic rights with her Urban Peace team after the 2007 release of their seminal report on gang violence in Los AngelesA Call to Action.

See www.powerconcedesnothing.com
for photographs and additional information.

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Copyright 2012 by Connie Rice, a.k.a. Constance LaMay Rice

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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2012

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011044089

ISBN 978-1-4165-7500-9 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-2592-9 (ebook)

For my amazing parents, Anna and Phillip

Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did, and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, Address on West India
Emancipation, 1857

POWER
CONCEDES
NOTHING

WAKE-UP CALL

T he sound of a ringing telephone early in the morning never means good news. In twenty years as a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles, Ive had my share of shattering midnight calls from police and gang intervention workers, clients and social workers, all with urgent summons to crime scenes, confrontations, and emergency rooms. But few calls rattled my world like the one that came on a quiet Jacaranda June morning in 2008.

The day had started peacefully enough. The neighborhood rooster had just begun his sun-raising reveille as my blue Prius rolled silently into the predawn darkness that hid the lilac splendor of the Jacaranda trees. Other than spending the night at work, this was my only way to avoid Los Angeless homicide-inducing rush hour, and to steal some time to think before the chaos of the day kicked in. With the red-light gods asleep, I blazed the nineteen-mile drive from my mountainside home to downtown L.A. in record time, arriving at work just as the sun sliced between the glass-and-chrome towers.