The Life and Career of Molly Munger, Co-Director Advancement Project, Los Angeles

Molly Munger was outraged by riots and racial tension in Los Angeles during the 1990s. She decided to change her life while changing the system. LawCrossing speaks to Ms. Munger about starting a public interest career after twenty years as a top business litigator.

Attorney Molly Munger started the Advancement Project in 1998 with partners Steve English and Constance "Connie" Rice. The three attorneys wanted to do more for civil rights and access to justice. The organization now employs 20 staff in Los Angeles and Washington DC.

For Ms. Munger, equality has been a career long passion. Initially her focus was on women's rights. As a woman at Harvard Law School in 1970, just 8 percent of her classmates were female and attitudes toward women were not always positive. When Ms. Munger aced a final exam in one of her law classes, the professor wrote on her paper: "you're not such a dumb blond after all Miss Munger."

It's easy to see why she was so drawn to the women's rights movement. Ms. Munger, who was one of only six women in the Harvard economics department during her undergraduate days, felt driven to prove them wrong by becoming a great attorney.

"It was sort of like a gauntlet being thrown down," she said. "I love practicing law and I love being a litigator. So I didn't have any problems with it. I wanted to do it and I was very active in the Bar. I gave a lot of presentations and I was president of the Bar Association. I was busy making myself this successful woman lawyer in a man's world."

Ms. Munger more than proved herself. She was a partner at Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson and spent five years as a prosecutor where she gained valuable trial experience. Ms. Munger loved her work in business law. But then the Los Angeles riots changed everything. She was outraged.

"While I'd been making it safe for women lawyers, look at what's been happening that I hadn't been aware of," she said. "I didn't know that our mayor wasn't speaking to the police chief, that racial feelings were this raw, that the police were talking about 'monkey slapping' time on their radios."

Ms. Munger began to think she would be more useful fighting for civil rights.

She went to lunch with Bill Lann Lee, who ran the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where she had done pro bono work. During lunch she railed against the lawlessness and failures in the system. Mr. Lee, she said, asked if she was planning to change her life. She was. In 1994, within a year of that lunch, she began working for the LDF fulltime.

"We were pretty horrified by the revelations of the racism, and the brutality and the lawlessness, the lying," she said. "Then we had these big riots and the police had refused to try and stop the riots, remember that? They kind of waited until South Central was on fire. I don't know, the whole thing was just a bad show to a person who cared either about fairness to African American neighborhoods or to people who cared about law enforcement doing its job and doing it in a fair and honorable way. I was both."

Fifty-five people were killed in several days of rioting in April 1992 in South Central Los Angeles after the acquittal of four white police officers caught on videotape beating African American motorist Rodney King. The city burned amid looting and retaliatory attacks against whites and Asians and some 2,000 people were wounded.

Ms. Munger and her partners now work on various projects through the Advancement Project. The organization's mission is "to explore revitalized approaches to problems of inclusion and equity."

In Los Angeles, they focus on making public systems do a better job for low-income residents, especially for children. The Advancement Project has been active in reforming LA's public transit system, public schools and the police force.

"We all started as litigators. But we became legislation drafters and vetters and public interest lobbyists and media communicators and data junkies," she said. "And we're very into mapping."

Connie Rice inspired the mapping project, Ms. Munger said. And the group helped create the Healthy City Project, an interactive Website that shows where health and human service organizations are located in Los Angeles County.

"I think it's great to be able to go to a Website and find all the social service programs mapped," she said. "You can look at them by neighborhood and see where things are located and where the holes in the safety net are."

They started by mapping where money was being allocated in school districts throughout the state of California. Green areas had lots of money, tan and gray areas were poorer. And you could see patterns, she said. The suburbs were generally green, inner cities gray.

It was such an effective visual aide, that they decided to map all the social services in neighborhoods. They started Healthy City with Children's Hospital and The Center for Nonprofit Management.

Ms. Munger received the Women Lawyers of Los Angeles Ernestine Stahlhut Award in 1996 with her co-director Steve English, and the ACLU of Southern California's Equal Justice Advocacy Award in 2002.

She serves on the boards of the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Children Now, the James Irvine Foundation, Occidental College, Southern California Grantmakers and the Westridge School for Girls.

Ms. Munger said she's been spending much of her time recently on the movement in California for universal pre-school, which is often costly and in short supply in many parts of the state.

And she says she's heartened by the progress made in Los Angeles since the early 1990s, especially in the police department under Chief William Bratton.

"We have schools going up all over Los Angeles that weren't going up before. That's an enormous change," she said. "We have this enormous middle school going up on eight acres. And we know these kids. The kids are our neighbors and they're crammed like sardines in a dilapidated building."

Ms. Munger urged attorney interested in a public service career to live frugally, even while they're in corporate practice, so that they don't get too used to an extravagant lifestyle. And she says attorneys should listen to their instincts, like she did while having lunch with Bill Lee.

"You can really tell when talking to somebody after talking to them for a while you know what really makes them light up and what doesn't," she said. "I think people ought to do the things that make them light up."