ABOUT THE BOOK
 From
one of America’s most influential civil rights attorneys,
Power Concedes Nothing is a hard-hitting memoir chronicling
a fiercely dedicated woman’s quest to win the first of all
human rights: freedom from violence.
Nominated for Outstanding Literary Non-Fiction
- NAACP IMAGE AWARDS |
CONNIE RICE has taken on school and bus systems,
Death Row, the states of Mississippi and California, and the
Los Angeles Police Department—and 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
Connie’s 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.
Rice—second cousin of former Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice—writes of being the great-granddaughter of
former slaves and slave owners who prized the aggressive
pursuit of knowledge. Even her U.S. Air Force childhood, of
seventeen moves across three continents, could not disrupt
this family legacy of voracious accomplishment.
After joining the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s 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 yourself—
a 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
America’s most dangerous neighborhoods, Power Concedes
Nothing is the story of an indomitable woman who knows that,
without a demand, power concedes nothing.
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