Civil Rights
Jul. 31, 2002
ACLU Executive Tackles New Challenge
SAN DIEGO - Linda Hills likes visual reminders. A framed photograph of the March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. made his "I Have a Dream" speech, hangs on her office wall.
A framed photograph of the March on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. made his "I Have a Dream" speech, hangs on her office wall.
Hills was there.
"I knew, and everybody in the audience knew, that this speech was a historic moment," said Hills, who at the time of the speech was a new college graduate.
Next month, the King photo will hang on a wall in New York, where Hills will begin a new job as a senior staff member at the American Civil Liberties Union's national office.
Hills has led the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties since 1984. Before that, she guided Hawaii's ACLU for six years.
"Linda has been the primary force in growing the San Diego chapter from something like an appendix on the Los Angeles affiliate into something that even nationwide is called 'the little affiliate that could,'" said Charles A. Bird, a partner at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps.
Hills packed the King photo when she moved to San Diego. There, she was first the director of the local chapter of the Southern California ACLU and then, when the chapter gained full affiliate status, executive director.
Hills spearheaded the effort to gain affiliate status for the ACLU in San Diego. Usually the ACLU has only one affiliate per state, and California already had two affiliates, one in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco.
Hills also recruited a diverse 25-member board of directors, about half of whom are not lawyers. Hills, too, is not a lawyer, and she likes to emphasize that the ACLU across the nation is not all lawyers.
Hills and her staff of four also are skilled money raisers. In the last 10 years, the affiliate has gained more than $2 million in endowment gifts. Although the San Diego and Imperial counties affiliate ranks 23rd in membership among the nation's 51 affiliates, it ranks eighth in income.
"She does that by being a very accomplished coalition builder," said ACLU treasurer Roberta Spoon, an accountant at San Diego's Brodshatzer, Wallace, Spoon & Yip.
As the affiliate's financial base grew, the group's profile as a civil rights defender also rose.
When the Republican National Convention was held in San Diego in 1996, the local ACLU raised free speech questions about plans to distance protesters from the event. The group also sought to legally thwart attempts by religious groups to take over public schools. In addition, it has entered local and political disputes involving student free speech rights, law enforcement tactics, jail conditions and personal privacy rights.
In what could be a landmark case, the San Diego ACLU filed suit in 2000 on behalf of two families - one lesbian and another agnostic. The families alleged they were barred from using city land because the Boy Scouts excluded gays, lesbians and nonbelievers.
For $1 a year, the city of San Diego leases land in Balboa Park to the scouts for a headquarters and camping area, as well as a parcel on Fiesta Island for a scout aquatic center. Last December, the City Council voted to extend the leases for 25 years. The ACLU alleges that the city is subsidizing discrimination. A pretrial conference is scheduled for next February.
In deciding whether to enter such controversies or even to initiate them, Hills and Jordan Budd, the San Diego ACLU's managing attorney, put their heads together.
"She really defines for me what a commitment to civil liberties means," said Deputy Public Defender Susan Clemens. The two met shortly after Hills arrived in San Diego. Clemens was just beginning law school and had joined a fledgling student ACLU chapter.
Immediately, Clemens said, the students noticed that Hills had an inner strength.
"It was the iron fist in a silk glove," said Clemens, an ACLU board member. "It's inspirational."
At the ACLU's national headquarters in New York, Hills will direct the new affiliate support department. She will be one of six national senior staff members who report to executive director Anthony Romero.
As affiliate support director, Hills will help Romero strengthen the ACLU's outposts. She will suggest ways money can be spent to assist small affiliates that face hometown hostility.
Candace Carroll, a San Diego board member for more than a decade and also a national board representative, said she hates to see Hills leave but is happy that Hills can exert her energies at the national level.
"It's work that demands passion," said Carroll, a lawyer with San Diego's Sullivan, Hill, Lewin, Rez & Engel.
To replace Hills, 61, the ACLU will look nationwide.
Hills' road toward the top has not been without some bumps.
"I didn't really find my niche until I got the job at the ACLU," Hills said. "I like building organizations. That's probably what I'm most proud of, that in both Hawaii and here I've been able to build very fragile organizations into viable, financially stable affiliates."
In 1973, Hills moved to Hawaii with her son and her husband, whom she later divorced. She became project director for the Hawaii Committee on Alcoholism, turning an ad hoc project into a permanently funded organization within a year. In Hawaii, many out-of-state alcoholics turn up, she said.
"People move around the country to get away from their problems," Hills said. "Hawaii is the last stop west. That's the way it has been explained to me by recovering alcoholics."
In 1978, she became executive director of the ACLU of Hawaii, and six years later she moved to San Diego, packing and unpacking the photo of King taken while he spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 21 years earlier.
Claude Walbert
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