Ramona Ripston, Long-Time ACLU-Southern California Leader, Dies at Age 91
Ramona Ripston, who led the ACLU of Southern California for most of 36 years, died on this day at age 91.
Ripston was hired as director of the ACLU affiliate in 1972. During her tenure as director she built the affiliate into one of largest and most active of all the ACLU state affiliates. She led the affiliate into what were often at the time new issues for the ACLU, such as the rights of homeless people. At that time she was hired the affiliate had six paid staff members; when she retired in 2011 it had 50, and by 2018 in had 90 employees.
Interestingly, after graduating from Hunter College in New York City in 1948 she began a career in modelling. Bored with that work, she first began volunteering for the ACLU, she became a full-time staff member in 1965, and then became its publicity director. In 1968 she left the ACLU to work for the Emergency Civil Liberties Union (ECLU). In 1972 she became director of the ACLU of Southern California.
Ripston was an assertive feminist. During her 1972 job interview, the all-male search committee asked her how she would do the job while also being the mother of small children. A bit later, when asked what her priorities as executive director would be, he replied that she would change the board of directors “so that unfair questions like this don’t get asked again.”
Some of the major accomplishments during her tenure at the ACLU of Southern California included starting the litigation that let to a 2004 $1 billion settlement with the state of California to upgrade pubic schools in poor and racially and ethnically minority neighborhoods. In 1984, the affiliate won a case that ordered the Los Angeles Police Department to disband its Public Disorder Intelligence Division, which had been spying on community activists and elected officials.
Ripston was married five times. He fifth husband was Stephen Reinhardt, a famously liberal activist judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who died in March 2018.
Visit the ACLU of Southern California web site.
Read the ACLU of Southern California memorial for Ramona Ripston.
Learn about the history of the ACLU: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (1990)
Visit the ACLU web site
Read the Memorial of Ramona Ripston in The Nation