 I get to tell you about two of my heroes. There's just so much in common, as I see many of my students here. I cannot think of two lawyers who've got a role models for you for your career, but Al Myroff and John Rice. Let me start by telling you a little about Al. There's a lot of details in the program, and I won't repeat all of that. Al went to Cornell-Waswell. He spent his career as a public interest lawyer, initially starting in California Rural Legal Assistance. One of the preeminent legal services and public interest law offices, not just in the state, but in the country. He made a real difference representing individual clients and changing the law, absolting the law so that undocumented immigrants were able to get education in California. He led there to the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is the preeminent public interest environmental law organization in the country. He had a tremendous amount of good there, including enforcing California's law regulating toxic substances. And then he went from there, the law from the Kotlin Stoyer. We specialized in bringing class action suits on behalf of plaintiffs. When his greatest successes was with the guard representing garment workers, we truly held their slave conditions working in sweatshops. Couple of years ago, in 2008, soon after I moved to Irvine, I got a call from the alley to get together and have lunch. We had a wonderful lunch together in Pasadena. We expressed excitement about UCI law school and all we were trying to achieve. We talked about his coming in teaching for us. He was very generous in saying when to financially support the law school, we also talked about ways in which we could raise even larger amounts of money. So tragically, soon after, he died of cancer. Not long after that, I kind of called his wife, Marcia Bramman. Marcia, can I introduce you to everybody? Marcia's here in the front row. Marcia's had a very distinguished career. She's a journalist, she's a news director, she's an executive producer, she's a host of her own television show and so much else. And she said that Al had been so excited about the law school, one of the things that she wanted to do in his memory was to be sure that she and Al still stayed involved with the guard of the law school. And we talked about what might we do to preserve Al's memory, to be honest, to honor both Al and Marcia. One thing that Marcia did was create the Elmira Public Interest Fellowships. Many of you who are second year students have funding this summer to be able to work in public interest and legal service offices because of the Elmira Fellowships. Marcia herself funded several of these. Additionally, we reach out to many of Al and Marcia's friends to help fund the Elmira Public Interest Fellowships. Several of the donors are here today. I'm not going to identify all of them, but could all of the students here join me in thanking Marcia and other donors for these fellowships? And this is not simply a program from last summer. This is a program that will continue for next summer and every summer after that. Funding our students who want to continue to do public interest and legal services work. I cannot say enough how crucial this money is in allowing students to begin careers doing public service. Well, one of the other things that Marcia said would be interesting doing was creating a lectureship in Al's honor, that every fall we would have an Elmira Public Interest Lecture. And this is the first of them. And as I was talking to Marcia, it immediately came to mind as to who would be the ideal person for this. A lawyer who actually worked with Al on a number of projects. A lawyer who also knew Marcia and worked with her. And a lawyer, as I say, is truly a role model to all of us. And that's Connie Rice. Connie went to Harvard College and then to New York University Law School, where she was a root tilde. After that, she clerked for Damon Keith, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Truly one of the great judges in American history. For a short time, she was an associate at Morrison and Forster. And then she went to work at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, coming out here to Los Angeles to be their regional counsel. She went from there to being co-founder and co-director of the Advanced Project. There is not an issue touching the public interest that Connie has not been involved in. She served as a member and chair to the commission that oversees the Department of Water and Power. She played a key role in reforming the Los Angeles Police Department. She worked together on a report, but I think it was Connie's words that best captured the LAPD in the need for reform. When she wrote that the LAPD exalted Dirty Harry and shunned Serpico. No sentence better captured the LAPD was about. In many of the recommendations that Connie made for changing the LAPD came into existence when the consent decree was adopted and she continued to be an advocate in so many ways. A very successful advocate for changing the LAPD. She worked very hard to help deal with the gang problem in Los Angeles. Played a key role in that regard. She played a crucial role in increasing funding through Los Angeles public schools. Having been key in getting bond measures passed and money directed for the building of new schools. She's worked on so many other issues. She worked with the guard to reforming Los Angeles transit system representing bus riders in a very successful suit. You might have seen in the past Sunday's Los Angeles times and not that one of her current projects performing the probation system in Los Angeles. So as I said, I cannot think of a better person to speak with us today. And I think of a better person to be the first alumni or public interest lecturer than my dear friend, Connie Grace. I can't possibly be a hero of yours because you're my hero, I just can't have it. Good afternoon, everybody. What a wonderful pleasure and honor it is for me to be here. Marcia, it's so great to see you again. And I have to say, I still can't believe how long it's gone. I mean, I, you know, if you think about what a public interest lawyer does, where didn't he go? Do you know how hard it is to do civil rights litigation to protect folks who really have no ability to protect themselves in side pan? I mean, before Julie Sue did her brilliant, brilliant lawsuit protecting the garment workers in San Gabriel Valley. Al was doing it. He was fighting modern day slavery before it even had a name and human trafficking has only gotten worse. But because he did that lawsuit, Julie and I knew how to protect the garment workers that we had in San Gabriel Valley. And when we were protecting kids from lead poisoning, there was Al. When he was at California Rural Legal Services, we also did the education litigation up in Sacramento together. It didn't matter what the name of the group was. If it was the most defenseless group, the most voiceless folks, Al was there. And I just want to say what a tremendous honor it is for me to be able to do this course lecture in his name and in his memory. And Al, we're fighting still and you're still with us. Please give him a round of applause. Great, great civil rights together. Irwin, don't look down because I, you know, every decade, I think I can't be more amazed by you. Who could start a new law school with capitalism as we know it ends? I mean, take over LAPD, become LAPD chief, capitalism ends. But you know, that's easy compared to starting a new law school. You've got to fundraise, like all get out. Only Irwin could take nothing and turn it into, I mean, it's already mentioned with Harvard and NYU. I mean, it hasn't been, how long have you been here? Irwin, I mean, it's just ridiculous. But Irwin is, as far as I'm concerned, a national treasure. I could not do what I do had Irwin not been there. He gives us our intellectual framework. It's not that we aren't right, but I'm talking about all of the intellectual capital in the public interest world in LA County and Orange County. There isn't a major case where Irwin isn't there telling us what the framework is. Between him and Tony Amsterdam, I cannot imagine better intellectual rights. And I mean, Irwin, the other thing about you is that you don't age. I mean, I could remember in my Barbary lecture where his video, his picture, I said, who is this cat who talks in full paragraphs and full sentences and periods? I mean, I never knew anybody who spoke outline before. I mean, you know, because he was doing those ridiculous Barbary courses. I mean, that was over 25 years ago. And passing a bar was not easy for me because I never took the time to study and I moved from state to state. It was always an adventure and abetting the lottery as well, whether I passed or not. But I passed to California because he was on the tapes and I just thought, wow, am I ever gonna meet this guy? A little bit, I know that I would actually be doing a number of cases. So Irwin, congratulations on the law school. You are, I'm so glad you're back. I was upset when you left. I didn't let you go. I still called you. I still made you help me. And you're not going anywhere now. So let's keep this law school going. Congratulations. It's really amazing. Oh, good, good. Just a few of you. Hope that you take away from this lecture a few ideas about how you can become change agents. You can become civic entrepreneurs. You can become catalysts to make this great country's blueprint of reality for the folks who really does not work. It's a very strange time now. It's not fashionable being civil rights. I mean, I dress in a Victorian manner because I'm actually Victorian. I mean, that's just my persona. I don't make any apology about it. I'm exactly what I look like, a black American empress. And I don't know what I'm talking about. I am a Neiman Marxist and Carol Sobel. Carol Sobel and I have a contest who buys more shoes. We need therapy, but we can't afford it because we're public interest lawyers. So shopping is our therapy. And Irwin just shakes his head when the two of us get together. Carol actually has a great sense of humor and has actually done the comedy club. I just laugh along with her. But I hope that students, you don't have to become like me. You're not to dress like me. You're not to be a loveite like me. But I hope that you take from this lecture a few ideas about what does it really take to pick up the baton that Martin Luther King passed off. Pick up the baton that Harriet Tubman has given to us. You know, my grandmother said that justice is a relay. It's a relay race. And each of us has a leg. And we're getting old and we need you to get ready. You know how in the relay, you start off, you see the runner coming up and you start off and you reach behind, but you don't look. And then we hand you the baton. We're getting old and we need to hand you that baton. So I am so glad that you are here. Because what I want to share with you is a sort of reality check on where we are and where we need to go. Because justice is a relay and we can never stop running it, okay? We have come up to a tremendous distance. My, just to give you a frame of reference, and I don't mean to, you know, scare you, but I am, I'm 54, relatively young. I know that sounds ancient to you, but you know, it's actually kind of young. But I am the great-granddaughter, not great-great, but great-granddaughter of slaves and slave owners. I'm Sally Hemings, okay? My family lives for a very long time and they had, those old days, they had lots of kids and I'm the descendant of the youngest of each of those clans. So we missed a generation in there. So instead of the usual three generations, it really has only been from legal chattel to legal counsel in four generations, okay? That is an astonishing story. It is an astonishing story. It could only happen in the United States. I mean, no apology. And the slavery that my ancestors went through was different from the slavery of the big Haitian style of plantations. As Sally Hemings, we served in the house and our legal story changed from that beginning point. Color cast means something. Yes, I'm very proud of the hard work, but all I had to do was push open the doors that were rammed open by Harriet Tubman's, by the Jackie Robinson's who fought civil rights on the mound and Martin Luther King who did his sermons on the mound and Thurgood Marshall's crusade in the courts and you had suffragists and the abolitionists in the Quakers and always the Jewish community, the Jewish community and the African-American community. That's the story of the NAACP in the Philippines. It is a Black and Jewish organization and it has always been a centerpiece and a central engine and driver. That partnership was the crusade in the courts. Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, Connie Rice, Carol, so it's still that story. It's an amazing story. Read crusaders of the courts. But that story, I begin there because we're still playing that script out. Where are we? The ending of slavery was the beginning but we are still fighting the vestiges of that fight even with the first African-American president. Martin Luther King Jr. who was the real domo general of the Civil Rights Revolution put it this way. He said the first phase of the Civil Rights Revolution, we agreed only to end brutality. And it was mainly because of the Cold War. I don't think without the Cold War that we would have agreed to do it. So politics always plays the backdrop. Always understand the political context in which you were mounting these civil rights crusades and it's human rights crusades which is under which civil rights and gay rights and all kinds of other, think of it as the human rights agenda, okay? And therefore you can subsume under that umbrella almost every human fight for justice, human fight for opportunity, human fight for the latter and the wrongs up and out. You're simply expanding the span of freedom, expanding the span of real opportunity, making sure that folks who want to take themselves out of poverty have the wrongs on the latter. And where are we today? Well, we've spent 30 years taking the wrongs out of the latter and Irwin and Al and all of those civil rights lawyers are trying to put those wrongs back in. And that's what we need you to do is to continue that fight. Even though it's out of fashion, even though we don't have cable shows, even though we're just not in style. I mean, it's about as in style as this outfit. Oh, it looks good on me, you know, it's my style of style, okay, you're not current, all right? And I am not on Facebook and I have to take down Facebook pages all the time so people keep trying to put me on Facebook. I don't socialize, so don't try and put me in there. I don't get the new media, I'm not gonna be part of it. Don't worry, but the message there is be comfortable with who you are and use the attributes that you have. You do not have to be kind of crazy like me. You can be crazy in a different way and do this stuff, but be comfortable with who you are and understand that for everybody who does this kind of work, it is a lonely fight. Be comfortable being by yourself. Be comfortable going against your tribe. Be comfortable fighting fights that no one else is going to fight. And be very happy that you're not gonna get an invitation to the Hanukkah party or the Christmas party because you're not gonna be invited if you do your job right. Loners are probably the best folks to do this kind of work. Doesn't mean you have to be, but if you're gonna do the most advanced guard work, shock troop work is what Elaine Jones might possibly go defense when he used to, she's gonna be your shock troop, your smoke jumper. And you got half folks like that. You don't have to play that role. You can be behind with a regular battalion of firefighters, smoke jumpers, jump out of the plane, and they stop the flames when you jump into the next. So if you're an emergency type person who likes the high action and so forth, you can do capital punishment like I started out doing. But the bottom line is just understand who you are and what your attributes are, and what you're comfortable doing. You don't have to do it. You may be more academic. Irwin probably looks at me and thinks, oh God, she's crazy half the time. But Irwin can lead a law school. There are a lot of different positions in this battalion. And so find the one that's comfortable for you, but do the one that matches your persona. I do the one that matches my persona. I'm a total owner. I like being out where no one else is. I don't want to get shot first. And so I'm a good shot trooper. I'm a good smoke jumper. Martin Luther King, Jr., about three months before he met his assassins bullet, he just had a debate. He was in New York and he'd just come back from New Jersey and he was kind of crestfallen because he'd had a confrontation with Amiri Barakha. Amiri Barakha was a self-styled black power revolutionary. And he had a big debate. And the debate was, do you continue non-violence, non-violent resistance? Or did you turn to black power? And this is 1968, right? And the young folks were tired of turning the other cheek. And so King found Harry Belafonte's apartment on West End Avenue. He went up to that amazing apartment that's like, you couldn't even buy it today. It's like a whole floor of a huge apartment building and it's got pictures of Harry Belafonte and Joey with every leader, another woman. And it was one of the few places where King could kind of relax. And he just needed to recharge his batteries. And so he found his way to Harry's and Harry knew it was something wrong and he said, what's the matter, Martin? And King looked at Harry and he said, I'm afraid. I'm just so afraid. He said, I'm afraid that we are fighting to integrate into a burning house. Harry had never heard King talk like this and he said, well then what is it we must do? Should we reverse course? He says, no. We are integrating into a burning house and we are gonna have to become firemen, fire fighters. And so my career has just been one of this moments in the country, in the country of Trumpers. And when he met by a burning house and when he said, when he said the first phase of the civil rights revolution, is we agreed to end brutality. We would no longer pack picnic lunches and go to lunch lynching. So how many of you have seen that lynching exhibit? If it ever comes back through, look at it. It is an incredible look into the American soul. Who packs a lunch to go watch a lynching? Watch ourselves, who those people are today? They're the same people in Europe. We shoveled people off to the Holocaust. You need to understand that in every culture and in every community, that capacity exists and it exists in all of us. So don't think that you're not capable of it. And half of our emotional battle is to make sure that we are the ones who would have sheltered Anne Frank, that we would have helped Harry Atonement, that we would not have packed a lunch to go watch a lynching. But understand in your own DNA, your own cultural DNA, where that comes from and when it gets reignited because it's always there dormant and latent. And it's in all of us. Don't kid yourself. So we agreed to end brutality. The first phase, what King wrote customously in a testament of hope is he wrote in his most famous essay of where to go from here. He said, the United States will not agree to go beyond ending brutality. It will not sustain a battle against the poverty that stems from slavery. It will not reach a consensus on building the grand alliance that he wrote about or spoke about in that Playboy interview that my mother was appalled by. But we did, that was one version of Playboy that was in the house because Martin Luther King had an interview in it. But in that interview, he said something very important because my mother exed out all, she tore out all the pictures. But, because she didn't want me getting a negative image of being a woman. So we had the interview, but the rest of the magazine was gone, much of my brothers just may. But in that interview, he talked about the grand alliance. The first grand alliance was the grand alliance that ended World War II. But he talked about the grand alliance between poor whites and poor blacks. And if you were in Southern California, and you even talked about poor Latinos, poor Thai, we've got everybody. We've got poor Aborigines, poor Ethiopians, poor Norwegians, we've got the whole world right here in our backyard. So he would have included all those other groups. But at the time, it was about poor whites and poor African-Americans. And he said, the poor Negro and the poor white are soon going to be obsolete because of automation. That's such an antiquated word that young people are looking at me like, what is she talking about? But that was his word for technology. He called it 50 years ago. He said, there's not gonna be me for no skilled labor. I don't think he saw all the outsourcing, but he called it. He said, because of automation, the poor white and the poor Negro are going to become obsolete. And therefore they must forge a grand alliance together to demand from both Democrats and Republicans the creation of jobs, the creation of upward mobility ladders. The grand alliance between poor whites and poor Negroes must happen, otherwise both populations will be rototilled into the ground. Did he get it right or what? He predicted. And he said, the poor white and the poor Negro have been pitted against each other from the beginning of this country because the only guarantee for poor whites was that they would have social superiority of lives. That's been the bargain in this country. Just accept the fact that we're not gonna really include you at the table. You're not gonna be part of the titans of industry. You're not gonna own land. And you gotta remember, the very first episodes of this country weren't just the dark bargain of slavery. They also locked out non-land only white males, which meant most of the white male population did not enjoy the privileges. It was an aristocracy of landowners who created this country. They were brilliant founding fathers. They were also slave owners, but they created an incredible framework that had room to expand, had room to come and realize the promise. King said the second phase of the revolution, he said lies, is what he called realizing equality. He said realizing equality is gonna be a whole lot worse to achieve. If you thought that hoses and dogs and bull corner and getting beat down and shot on the bridge, the Selma, and if you thought that was bad, wait until we demand of this country a redistribution, not just a political power, but economic power. That's what the realization of equality requires. Kings, we love to talk about that wonderful, and I still get goosebumps every time I hear I have a dream, right? I mean that, we keep playing at over and over and over again and most of America thinks he was this nice, quiet little preacher talking about he has a dream of black children and white children, Jews and Gentiles and this ringing endorsement of this vision of inclusion. I love I have a dream too, but he would tell us to wake up and smell the coffee because the most important speeches from Martin Luther King, Jr. were about what he called, quote, the radical reconstruction of the American edifice that will be required to achieve the second phase of the civil rights revolution and students, that's where we are. We haven't achieved it, okay? In fact, in 2010, we've created a bigger wealth gap. There are more families of all races becoming impoverished. The middle class is hanging on by its fingernails, right? The downward mobility is gathering speed. He predicted all of this and he said, I'm a capitalist, but I want capitalism with a humane center. He said, if you let profits run your entire capitalism line, you will not have what he called human-centered capitalism. And he said, realizing equality and achieving human-centered capitalism, which means you do not take the welfare of children and sublimate it to the need for the gap to make more money. You do not countenance slave labor in side pan. That's why I went over there and made sure because those were American companies using child labor. That the very same people fighting healthcare today, the same plutocrats that funded the pseudo-populist attacks against social security, child labor laws, the safety net, medicare, there will be jail. I mean, it's the same interest using working class people to counter their own interests and it works every time. And we're seeing it today with the Tea Party. Not all of them. There's a righteous anger there and it oughta be there and Martin Luther King would be meeting with them right now because they were part of the grand alliance he envisioned. What we have to understand is where we are today, where we are in this revolution. When Barack Obama became president, C. King was right in a number of ways. He was right that we would quickly abort any kind of real serious effort to end extreme poverty in this country because it was LBJ who asked the head of OMB and I can't remember his name, I used to know his name, but he LBJ said, how much would it cost to end extreme poverty? How much would it cost to have all the people in my East Texas district get into the middle class? How could I see a stop in the increase of poverty? LBJ asked that question and the director of OMB said, it would cost, it was something like $6 trillion at the time. And the calculation under LBJ's directions was how much would it cost so that the rich could continue getting richer because that would have to be the Palo Alto market. I think it was very practical. So the rich, he said the rich could continue getting richer than everybody else but they would have to do it at a slower pace. But if you slowed it down to X percentage of increase each year and you invested in these systems of education and funding for college and funding for daycare and funding for healthcare and laid out the engines that advance and put the ladders, put the runs back in the ladder so that folks who are willing to work can climb out because that's really all we've been doing with our civil rights cases, really, is creating those ladders. People will take to upward mobility automatically. You just have to give them the tools. You're not giving them handouts, you're giving them the tools and you're giving them the chance to overcome the stuff they have nothing to do with creating their circumstances into which they work. We've spent the last 30 years taking shifting fiscal risk from socialized fiscal risk to individual families yet we've socialized corporate risk. We socialized corporate risk which is not a bad thing to do because you want companies to take risk. You want companies to create wealth and to create wealth you have to take risk and you don't want them all going under. That's why we have our bankruptcy laws and capitalism is an amazing thing. Study your bankruptcy, study your property courses. The best courses that helped me on civil rights were not civil rights courses because we don't put any teeth in our civil rights laws. What we put our teeth into is contract law. Master contracts and master property law because that's how I learned how to take front load of big class action case, load it up with facts and then flip it to a settlement negotiation because the settlement negotiation is governed by contract law and contract, they don't undo contracts. With a blink of an eye, they don't undo a promise for civil rights but the standard for undoing the contract is almost an impossibility standard. So once you've transferred the human rights framework into the contracts framework, then you locked it in, okay? And what's even tighter than contract law, bond law. Study bond law. That's how we got the schools fixed. That's how we got the schools built because we had to lock the politicians up because you can't give them any money. They'll spend it up in salaries for everybody and their friends and schools don't get built. They had 100,000 kids with no seats. What if we had to take over the school board? Don't do that through the 501C3 though. You gotta get a law firm to do that, okay? Otherwise you'll have new gig rich having hearings on you. But we have a law firm and we have the Advancement Project. That's a soft side of Sears and we do our policy work and we're nice and we talk and we do summits and conferences and we issue papers on that side, right? But I'll only talk for about 10 minutes. I'll talk to you for about half an hour but if I see that you're not willing to really go the distance in changing the fundamental things that need to be changed, you're gonna get a law center, you're gonna get some legislation or you're gonna get taken out of office on the hard side of Sears, which is a law firm. You have to have both. The conservatives have both. I don't know why we're afraid to have both. But we need both. And we did. We got the Republican mayor and we took three people out of office and we put Janita Hayes in there. Janita Hayes makes me look mild and I'm trying to come to Janita when I grow up. Put her as president of the school board and she fired everybody she could see and we fired everybody in the facilities division because they had football coaches and our teachers building schools and then you wonder why they built the Belmont School on an exploding methane field. Well, you know, you got a football coach to charge us a $400 million high school development and why? Because of this, his term to do something important, they told us. His term to do something important. He had never so much as built an outhouse with Legos but he was given this job. I mean, you really have to go get a genotomic after you meet these folks because they're in their own little world and you just can't believe that they fit this way but they did and they wasted $60 million. We had to get these people out of the way. Okay, they were just too stupid to deal with it. You have to get them out of the way, all right? They had to wall them off. Well, the only way you can wall them off without creating a whole new department is that you have to actually, I said, okay, contract law bonds, school construction bonds. We did a case, Godinas v. Davis and Davis who was a reverse ATM machine and cared about money but didn't really care about building schools. So we can get this case out. We can bring a billion back to LA and that's what we did. Godinas v. Davis with 11 months, we had a billion dollars in the bank through that lawsuit and that was a masterful class action litigation that we did. But the cases are easy compared to actually getting the full job done. Yes, you're gonna have to get your chops as lawyers. You're gonna have to figure out how to put ex-party applications together, Hades petitions together. You're gonna have to figure out how to put a total six of a weekend to a total six. We're going to a total six because there's no longer private attorney general provisions anymore. We're doing one in the MTA case but you can find proxies for it. You can find state law equivalents for the adverse impact standards which is probably the most important area of civil rights law that there is right now. And we have to preserve it. They're gonna go after adverse impact with claw hammers because adverse impact forces you forces you to change and restructure. Why? Because the inequality in the outcome is what triggers the need to change. It's not about looking for people in hoods with burning crosses and intentional discrimination. We don't care if it's intentional. If the system, if the ghosts in the system just inadvertently who knew just produce this kind of unacceptable gaps in equality of opportunity, you don't have to fix it. It doesn't matter how or why it happened. So your job is to make sure that adverse impact does not get run out of the structure of our legislation, federal and state and that these judges get educated enough not to be afraid of it. It's now being portrayed as a communist plot like everything else or socialist plot. So don't let that happen. But the bond law, you get something not the precatory language mind you. You gotta know the structure of the bond. Are you with me? We had to get the provisions of the strategic execution plan which said that only the professionals could touch the line. We have a lot of politicians away from the money like a crack addict away from crack. Cause if you let the politicians get it schools won't get built. Kids were sitting on a broom closets and window sills and a hundred thousand children with no seats. Can you imagine how in the world did that happen? And mommy and I just, we went in and we said when are you gonna build these schools? Well we're having the human meeting for 20 years and we haven't built a single school. And the one school that you did build made it on 60 minutes as a blaming disaster. What are you people doing? And they told me they were meeting. They think the meeting is the product. Not the school that got lost in the world of odds. You kind of have to create an alternative parallel structure to get the job done. And it feels really big, okay? Told us to yank three people out of office. Now you don't do electoral politics until it's the absolute last resort. That's the last resort. You do a class action also before you do politics, okay? That is a nasty business. And when you have a leading congresswoman and I mean you have to go get your tribe, be ready to go get your tribe. Cause I've sued more Democrats and more African Americans I have anybody else, okay? I am not invited to the black congressional caucus, okay? I am, you know, I don't mention my name to Maxine Waters or anything like that. I love my African American leaders but I'm sorry I had to sue most of them and I sued my board members, okay? And now you don't have to get that crazy. I didn't sue three board members and a former LDF colleague. Three months after he left LDF I sued him because he took over the MTA and I had to sue him. He wasn't doing the right thing. I met with him. He went and already said about the bus riders. I said, you're robbing the bus system. You're robbing the bus system to build rail. The average rail rider has, you know, average income of $60,000. Two cars. The average bus rider is a female head of household. Average income of $10,000 a year with two kids and she has no car. She uses the bus to drop off three kids in the morning and I know this because I follow my client around and you have to follow your client around to understand how hard their lives are. If you don't understand viscerally how hard your client's lives are, especially a princess like me who expects to be show for brand. I have to get out there otherwise I have no clue what I'm advocating for, right? You've got to get there. If you've got a client on death row, you've got to spend some time on death row. You've got to understand what your client is living. Are you hearing me? Four o'clock in the morning. She starts at four o'clock in the morning, she has three kids. One bus ride, she drops off at her sister's, one child. Who could afford daycare? Certainly not a woman who works in the garment industry. The last two kids are dropped off at her mother. So that's the second bus ride. Then we take a branch shuttle to get to the 110 freeways where they express ride back downtown. That's another 40 minutes. Then she has to get down to Ninth Street. So that's like what, five transfers each morning? By the time she got to her job, then she works eight to nine hours in a sweatshop on Ninth Street. I dropped her off and walked back to my office at Ninth and Olive. I had to lie down for an hour. I was exhausted. I knew what that bus meant to her. And then I met her at five o'clock that evening and she had to stop, an extra stop to pick up groceries because the refrigerator they had was so small that she basically has to buy food every day. And then we stopped the grandmothers, the sisters, and finally made it back. Okay, where I picked up my car. I knew what I was fighting for. And when I looked at my former colleague, Franklin White, and I said, why are you taking the last $60 million to do a rail study? You're taking it out of the bus system and you're canceling the OWL service that the janitors need to get to their jobs? These are people who don't have cars? I said, are you drunk? He said, well, Connie, most of these poor people don't work anyway, do they? This is a civil rights lawyer. I said, okay, I start packing up my, you're in trouble when I start packing my briefcase. I said that that means I've decided you can no longer exist, okay? When I shut up and I start packing up and I bid you very polite adieu, you're in trouble, okay? Because I'm just planning in my mind. The reason I'm quiet is because I'm figuring out how to inflame you in court, okay? It's over, all right? No, don't let me think I can't go anywhere with you because once I've decided you're too stupid or you just don't get it, oh, wait, it's over, okay? May I ask the other one? No. I told the bus riders there was no way we were gonna win. Bus riders, you mean, probably the best clients I've ever had. And the last Maoists in L.A. County. At the time we got done with that case and the case, listen to the theory of the case. The theory of the case was you can't gut the bus system to build rail. It just didn't feel right. Okay, so kind. That's not gonna make an argument in federal court, okay? It just doesn't feel right to, no, that's not gonna get it. Luckily, I knew a little bit about DOT regs. Never overlook the regs, okay? Never overlook the regs. These regs were written by exonium Republicans who didn't want Democrats building political power by building big capital projects like rail. Because when you build a big capital project like rail, you get political power. Because if you had a billion dollar contract to tutor Salih, but guess what? You get to pick up the phone and you become a queen maker. Tutor Salih became a writer, check to you. But I can say, you know, fund her campaign but don't fund his. I'm a queen maker, right? Quite a million dollars in Gray Davis's pack. Gray Davis owes me. So it's not quite a brothel. It's closer to an escort service, okay? Okay? And once I understood this, finally, because I'm thinking mass transit, why do they keep defunding the system that serves 96% of their passengers? 96% of their passengers were bus riders. And yet these 15 politicians, it was a regional authority. It was no way a federal court was gonna shut down the policy choices and funding choices of a multi-jurisdictional regional authority that had delegated power from the state and the state and local government. How many of you have taken that? It was a nightmare. And I just looked at the clients, I said there's no way a federal court's ever gonna enjoy these kinds of choices from a lobby like this. But comedy, not C-O-M-E-D-Y, but comedy problems and the federalism problems are enormous. And so I told the bus riders, you wanna know something this is so outrageous? We need to go to court. But we're going to lose. And I canceled the last vacation I even tried to take. But we had about 11 days to get a thousand-page petition together. I believe we're front-loading, get as many. And we got Tom Rubin, who was the former CFO of the bus system. And he gave us all the dirt. He gave us 100-page declarations four nights in a row. He basically spilled all the beans. He showed us where all the skeletons were buried. He said, oh no, he says, I said, here's what the judge is gonna say. He's gonna say if he stops them from raising the fares and transferring this money to the rail system, from the bus system, that we will be interfering with the normal operations of a county-wide transit system. And the judge will not wanna do that. I said, I need some ammo. So he told me, he said, no, it would take him five minutes with one announcement because all the buses have radios. So one announcement. And he said, oh no, the passes, it's nothing to change it because they have 170,000 pre-printed passes with the old amounts on. And they're in a closet in the fifth floor of the seventh and main headquarters. And they're in the back and I know exactly where they are and I still have the keys. So we had all the ammo because we had their former chief financial officer with us in court. Other secret weapon, always get a mold, always get an insider because you go into court and you know more than the counsel for the entity because you know more about that entity than the lawyer for the entity does. When you're a civil rights lawyer, you can never, ever let your opponent see your offices because when they see the orange grates and they see the microfiche systems, they realize you don't have a dime to your name and the only thing that you live with is guts, moxie, determination and the fact that you're carrying out a mission that's been handed down through time. And then you have to honor that mission that you're on a mission. I won't say it's holy because I'm really, I'm steinian in my view on faith but it feels that way. Because when you realize the people who died, we're standing on their shoulders. There's an African-American man in the presidency and Hillary would have won if he hadn't. I don't want to say we haven't made any progress but it's a paradox. Don't be afraid of paradoxes. History is full of them. And we're at a very interesting time now and you can pick this baton up that you need to understand the paradox. I had a vision, remember that how CNN followed Barack Obama down the stairs and then he was outlined and the Capitol door, the Capitol balcony door and the cameras were behind him and you saw him go through. So in one shot, when CNN had the cameras, we were allowed to follow him from behind. And so he went through that door into the daylight to the Capitol balcony to do his inaugural dance. And in my mind, as he went through that Capitol door, the door to Corey Island which is also a semi-circle, I saw that shine. In my mind, when he walked through that Capitol door, we closed the door in no return. We did not realize equality, but we shut that door. That's huge. That chapter is done, okay? Now it's our job to pick up where Martin Luther King left when he's obsessed with the lip-medic and that's to realize equality, realize equality. And it's gonna be harder now because you can't even say the S-word. We are going to have to get out there now. You know, they have me on Fox News and they got me on The O'Reilly Factor and you know, I'm on there as parsley, really. Just fodder up with the little clown to knock around. But I go on those shows to practice my debating because if you hear Irwin on the radio, the one thing about listening to Irwin on the radio is that he goes more than toe-to-toe. He masterfully and bloodlessly is just so spot-like, you know, the way he tears apart the other side with all of the gentility and he's so blight. And then he just slays, slays, slays, slash, slash. You're left with, we have got to master that because the public is not with us. We have lost the mantle. We have lost the public debate. You know, my cousin, Condoleezza, I know we're actually more alive than not, so don't get excited. My family is Republican. I came out wrong, but we are Goldwater. I mean, my grandfather put a Goldwater sign in Black Cleveland. They left Birmingham and they had to go because smart black people didn't do too well in the South. But so they went to Cleveland, but he had his own restaurant. He was a landowner. My granddad, my granddad Rice was a mean landowner and he was a top barbiner and he ran a restaurant. And, you know, it was what it was. But when he put that Goldwater sign in, some of my cousins refused to come to the house. But that's how Republican my family is, Goldwater. I mean, we've been the only sign in all of Cleveland from the Black family. I mean, you know, so I'm the kid out here. We're the military men, both my parents were spies. I mean, you can understand, you know, we are a very strange mood, all right? I came out of this because we grew up overseas. We moved almost every year. And I missed the civil rights movement. We were in London. I'm a drinking team. My father was being appointed to the court of King James, if you can believe it. I came back and he was 68. And so, I got to ride that crest right into law, right into Harvard, right into law school. Totally oblivious, as usual. Or, when we'll tell you, I am socially oblivious. And I have to be told where to stand and which invitation is not to throw away. And you all are much more social than that. You'll be much more successful. But do not be afraid to analyze these issues in their totality. Law is only a limited tool. Law is a sledgehammer and a call hammer. You have got to get political skills. You have to get media skills. You have to build. When you do a class action impact case, it's not a lawsuit. It is an alternative platform to create policy. And it's a campaign. When you get that consent decree, it's only the first step. You've won the case, and a lot of lawyers make a mistake because we're so egocentric, that it's actually about us and our cases. How many Supreme Court arguments we make. As far as I'm concerned, you can make a mental practice if you're before the Supreme Court in the United States of America. I told that to my bosses and I almost got fired. I made my clients agree to drop the case if it looks like it's going to the Supreme Court in the United States of America. That's how much we've lost the bench as a check on where we are. But at the same time, you have an African-American president. Hillary Clinton, hopefully, will be the next president after this one. You've got youngsters who really don't think like in terms of tribe and race. I mean, it's there, but it's in the background. That's a huge advance. We created a black middle class and a Latino middle class, and there were more poor whites who went into the middle class. And then we stalled, and now we're starting to go back. It doesn't mean we can't go forward. It doesn't mean we can't go forward. It doesn't mean we can't go forward again. We just have to fight for the concepts, for the frameworks, for the wrongs. We have to figure it out, and we're going to have to create a new grand alliance. That's what we have to do. And litigation is going to be a big part of it. But litigation, don't think of litigation as your only tool. In fact, there's a single class action impact case that can change the hearts and minds of an LAPD officer. And Irwin and I used reports, we used lawsuits, we used law review articles, we used everything there is in the wrong law to use against the police, because they really were centurions. They were the Praetorian Guard. They were occupying an intimidator police. That's what LAPD's culture was, and they could tell you in a minute. We are, we intimidate those who intimidate others, and we're going to, and we are the thin blue line, and we are here to suppress from cops saying that. And so, except that, don't run from it. I had to switch from litigator to anthropologist. I said, we want every case against LAPD. How many more cases are we going to file? We're not changing how they think and how they feel. I need to understand why they behave the way they do. We started with Irwin's report, where Irwin brilliantly pulled together this analysis of the rampart, and it's not about one bad apple or five bad apples. It's about a poisoned tree, a poisoned orchard, a poisoned barrel. We're talking about the whole Kibbutl being poisoned by a culture and a mindset that actually requires cruelty from one cop to another, and when cops are mean to each other, they're mean to the public. Anybody ever can stop by an old LAPD cop, you don't know. Listen, in the heat of the night, they're mean. They're mean to each other. Irwin and I and Carol and Paul Hoffman and the whole crew that he pulled together, we discovered that, and then I did a second report that actually interviewed 700 police officers from the FBI, LAPD, LSD, I mean, we just spent a year and a half talking to cops. And I wasn't litigating against them. I switched hats. I said, I need to understand you. And yes, I'm that crazy civil rights lawyer who now straightens her hair because I didn't used to him as all over the place. I look like Angela Davis with long hair. I mean, I was scary looking. But until Carol Sobel told me I needed to straighten my hair and look more sophisticated, which is the new look. I'm on a bad day. I'll go back to the other. At the time, we had to become anthropologists. We had to listen to the cops. These are cops who threw us bodily out of rooms. Cops who would say to Ramona Ripston, I refuse to breathe air you breathe. I mean, it was like fifth grade fights. It was war. We would wake up every day trying to figure out how to make LAPD miserable. After they caused that riot and did that Bradley King number, I mean, it was on. Johnny Cochran, Irwin, Me, Paul Hoffman, all everybody in the ACLU, LDF, all that. We were all, I mean, it was war. We had to switch from that to getting them to trust us enough to talk to us. I said, why? Hey, this way. I need to understand. And then I learned to ask the question, what do you need us to do so you can change? So that you can stunt intimidating and find some compassion and empathy for the people you're supposed to protect. What will it take for you to see this community that you think you're supposed to caution control? What will it take for you to see that you need to get them to trust you? That you need to be partners with them? That you need to have some compassion? Here is the smart thing. If we had done one-on-one interviews, they'd given us rank, serial number, and name. They were POWs. And if we had done the interviews, they wouldn't even give us that. We know that from having to propose them in three years. It takes three years to get documents to request with LAPD. They're brilliant at shutting down information and burying it and spreading it out and dislocated systems so that not even the city attorney knows what data her client has. We knew all those tricks. Here's what we learned. We put them in groups like group therapy so they could all see one another and they could hear what everybody else was saying. And then they didn't feel like snitches. And when they were in a group together, even when we were in the back of the room, and there were cops asking the questions, they couldn't get them to shut up. I had this one cop call and say, are you coming? When's the next session? When are you coming back? We were scheduled for an hour and a half and three and a half hours later. They're still talking. And here was the thing. Thank God for nuns. Kathleen Solati, who was the attorney working with me, the young attorney working with me, she went to Catholic Girl School her whole life. And the nuns blessed them thought that a girl could only work as a secretary. So she had typing from third grade through twelfth grade, which meant Kathleen typed at transcription speed. And if you come into an interview with a tape recorder, people shut down. If you come into an interview with one of those transcription machines, people shut down because they know that you're getting every word. If they think you're taking conceptual level notes, they won't shut up. They say it's like being in a confessional. I mean, iron's done from cops. Irwin, you wouldn't believe it. I mean, it was like the police director's union. They actually cooked dinner for us and Cliff Roth told me, if you ever tell anybody that I cooked dinner for you, I'm going to kill you. But that was how it started in this venture that Bratton asked us to do, which was to do the last report, following up on Irwin's report, to do the last report on the Rampart scandal. What did we miss? So it was a litigation. It was a piece of litigation. It was a report, just like Irwin used. They wouldn't shut up. They told me, I said, why do you lie? The directors of the league said, can't you tell lie after lie after lie till we don't know we're lying anymore? Another cop said, what you call lying, I call survival. We have to lie because we have to make our numbers and we don't get promoted. So as Irwin pointed out, and as we pointed out in our report, the incentives were all wrong. They were brutalized. They were mean to each other because they were mean to the public because they were mean to each other. They had the wrong incentive systems and we had set up a set of physics that put into every single cop's mind in order to survive this perverse system, I have to lie. They committed perjury and they said, we commit perjury on the scene. Irwin and I could have had 10 years of depositions. We had never gotten those kinds of confessions but because they thought that they were talking to other cops because they wanted to move on their terms in their lives to a different kind of profession and they had a transformative chief and transformative chief, Bratton, which Irwin and I played a big role in getting to LA an outside chief who was strong enough and transformative enough and at the end of that Bratton era, I can tell you right now we just got the Summer Night Lights data back and around the parks where you do around the clock food you have clothes for the kids you get a thousand jobs you've done a negotiation with the local gang so that they don't do drive-bys and they agree to keep the violence down you pay them to do foot patrols with LAPD now there's a picture for you that could not have happened 15 years ago the data came out yesterday gang crime in general is down 13% down for the ninth year in a row but around the Summer Night Lights parks where the parks stay open until two in the morning and there's midnight basketball and midnight soccer and midnight swimming and chess tournaments until 11 o'clock at night and the gang members are there too without their guns and without the drugs I'm talking about hotspots places the FBI won't let their agents go around all of those parks the average drop in drive-by shootings and gang homicides is 50% drop from last year that's on top of the 30% drop citywide so when you have the cops and you've won their hearts and minds and you get them to start working with the community and start being intimidators and they accept gang intervention workers who are ex-gang bangers and they stop doing drive-byes because there's a movement of foot on the Anti-Island stuff which we have had a huge part when it comes together and everybody's in the boat rowing it becomes that grand alliance that King was talking about we start to solve the problem at a mechanic level and in the toughest areas so go where the problem is the toughest outed rural stuff is much harder than urban stuff in some ways what's happening with the crack cocaine we have civil war levels and we still have civil war levels of post-traumatic stress that we're fighting but out in the rural areas you can't even see the kids where the meth labs are we have a meth economy that's where all of my heart would have been so whether you're out in the rural legal service or you're in the urban core that's band task force go where it's toughest look systemically don't limit yourself to just legal keep in mind where we are historically we're in the middle of realizing equality and young people I'm tired I need to hand you the baton I have full faith in you watch what our woman does he's the quintessential model for this stuff and so is out minor hall but this is an extraordinary time in our history all I've done is ride the waves that other people set in motion it was easy for me to walk through the doors I didn't even have to use a battering ram and what we owe the kids coming behind us we cannot lose the promise that they will do better than we are than we are doing we cannot hand them a country where they can't have jobs we have to engineer not just the equality we're going to have to engineer the prosperity we're going to have to engineer the upward mobility and we're going to have to fight for some socialist ideas like social security like shared risk like responsibility it's not either or do not accept these false choices that the idea is if we had set a lunar landing today as a goal China would have beat us to the moon even though the earth was flat I am not handing this country over the best and the brightest betrayed us my friends wrote those ridiculous derivatives calculations and they bankrupted this country and the world and so the best and the brightest betrayed us but that does not mean that you go to your worst and your dimmest I am not accepting this irrational nonsense we have to speak up we have to debate like Orban does slash it to the bone and be funny about it if I could do it anybody could do it realizing equality and when he said this country will not pay the price of the radical reconstruction that it requires he meant the kinds of programs that FDR fought for he meant programs that push a set of values shared responsibility a culture of achievement he meant both the moral and individual DNA of success and unruh mobility inequality but he also meant the institutional and ladies and gentlemen we are all engineers it just depends on what you want to engineer back to that agenda young people it's an exciting time I you all have technology that will let you do stuff I can't even imagine just think of me as somebody from the 19th century who can kind of give you the historical overview and call me if you meet me in Irwin is an amazing, amazing guy to put a template on and I just want to tell you that Al Myerhov was so busy realizing equality for people who had no voice they had no power they had no money but with his help they cut off it's good work, thank you