Ramona Ripston Retires as Executive Director of the Southern California ACLU

Ramona Ripston is retiring today after 40 years as executive director of the ACLU of Southern California. During that time, she’s been a champion of affirmative action, school busing, gay marriage and abolishing the death penalty. She had a lot to do with reforming the LAPD after incidents of police abuse that led to the Rodney King uprising in 1972. More recently, she’s focused on homelessness--on the ground that “poverty is a civil liberties issue.” She herself has told the LA Times that the Southern California ACLU is “a peculiar ACLU.”