High Profile: Rita Laura Sklar

“I can’t stand to see people suffer. Honestly it’s torture to watch, because I feel it. It’s almost a curse.”
“I can’t stand to see people suffer. Honestly it’s torture to watch, because I feel it. It’s almost a curse.”

Rita Sklar's first individual act against injustice came at age 10, when she sat down during a class recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. She was protesting the war in Southeast Asia.

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“She doesn’t let it become personal or let personalities drive the discourse. … Rita comes with facts and studies and makes a compelling case based on actual data, not just emotion and histrionics.” — State Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson

SELF PORTRAIT

Rita Sklar

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: April 4, 1960, New York

FIRST JOB: working at a dry cleaners at 13

WORST JOBS waiting tables

MY WORST FEAR IS that something should happen to my family.

HAPPIEST MOMENT: when my son was born

ON WEEKENDS YOU’LL FIND ME weeding my garden, sleeping late, going to the farmers market and going to estate sales.

MY PET PEEVE ABOUT AMERICAN SOCIETY is that we don’t teach civics in our schools, that we don’t appreciate our own form of government.

SOMETHING PEOPLE DON’T KNOW ABOUT ME: I have a hybrid kayak/canoe and that I love to float and fish.

MY FAVORITE CHARACTER TRAIT IN PEOPLE IS compassion.

MY ONE TAKE-AWAY FROM GRADUATE SCHOOL was that there’s a difference between being interested in things and being a scholar or an academic. I am the former and not the latter.

ONE WORD THAT SUMS ME UP: empathetic

"I knew I had rights, and I knew I had the right to exercise them," says Sklar, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas since 1993.

She had heard her parents and others talk about the war in Vietnam and was struck by the iconic black-and-white photograph of a young girl running naked and screaming in the street, fleeing a napalm bomb attack, in 1972.

The image is still fresh in her mind. She was with her parents when she saw it for the first time as part of an art exhibit in her native New York.

"It really took my breath away," Sklar recalls. Her solitary classroom "sit-in" was her way of processing it.

She eventually found a career fighting for the rights of others, first at the national office of the ACLU and then with the Arkansas affiliate.

One of the most highly publicized cases supported by the Arkansas office in recent history involved a Dover mother and son, Eva and Matthew Robinson, who say they were victims of excessive use of force by two Pope County sheriff's deputies who stopped the pair in 2011 as they walked their dog near their home. Matthew was 16 at the time.

A federal jury sided with the two deputies following a 2015 civil trial, but not before one of the law enforcement officers agreed to pay the family $225,000, essentially mooting his verdict.

Sklar said when the ACLU filed the case on behalf of the Robinsons in 2013 that an independent agency was needed in Arkansas to investigate complaints about police and that it was time for police agencies across the state to take a "community" rather than "military" approach with their residents.

Ron Robinson, speaking on behalf of his wife and son, says that the family's intent at the outset of litigation was to hold the officers accountable. Testimony showed that one of the deputies, with the help of the other, used a Taser on Matthew multiple times during the encounter that escalated into a major event. Eva and Matthew were arrested but never convicted of any crime.

Sklar is synonymous with the ACLU, Ron Robinson says.

"She's a very kind person who can do this [work] in a compassionate way," he says. She and her legal director, Holly Dickson, "were able to make an unbearable situation bearable."

"They're what I've come to call 'completers,'" Robinson says. "Once they take on a case, they see it through with thoroughness, but also in a professional manner."

On the back of Sklar's cellphone is an ACLU sticker that looks like a stop sign bearing the words "GET A WARRANT" in all caps.

"People do not know what they can and cannot do as government agents. It's absolutely astounding," Sklar says. "People tend to know a lot more about the democratic principle than the principle of liberty."

It's all about people, not high ideals, Sklar says. She's empathetic, almost at a cost to her own emotional well-being. The Robinson case is an example.

"I can't stand to see people suffer," she says. "Honestly it's torture to watch because I feel it. It's almost a curse."

CALL OF THE FOOTLIGHTS

Named for bombshell actress Rita Hayworth, Sklar grew up in New York with a younger brother and an older sister. Her grandparents were Russian Jews who immigrated early in the 20th century to escape systematic persecution by their government.

In her ethnically diverse Bronx neighborhood, being Jewish was more about cultural identity than religion, she says. She remembers hearing her late parents talk about the persecution and execution of Jews, and being told that prejudice was wrong and that it was a social problem that would always exist.

"If I would ask what we as Jews believe in, they would say, 'To make the world a better place than when we found it,'" she says.

The Sklars exposed their children to music, theater and the arts. As a kid, she put on short plays at school and at home, inviting neighbors to be her audience. She graduated from New York City's High School of Music and Art, the companion institution to the NYC High School of Performing Arts, where the 1980 movie Fame was set.

Like so many aspiring actors in the Big Apple, Sklar waited tables while waiting for her big break. The work -- and the rejections -- wore on her.

"You really have to have the hunger to do it ... and at one point I realized I didn't have it anymore," she says. "And that was a very hard thing to accept because it had been a part of me for so long."

Then 24, Sklar went back to finish the bachelor's degree she'd started years before and "took classes in everything I was ever interested in, hoping something would stick." She finished at Hunter College of the City University of New York, then went on to Columbia University Graduate School, intent on becoming a religion professor.

But she soon realized she was too impatient for the amount of study required of scholars -- she wanted to "do something." It was by pure luck that a friend of a friend knew of a job opening at the national office of the ACLU in New York.

"On my first day on the job, I walked onto an elevator, and there were three women arguing intensely about some legal/social justice point. [They argued] all the way up the elevator to the eighth floor and on the way off the elevator," she says.

"I thought, 'This is the place for me.'"

She found her ACLU compatriots to be knowledgeable and smart, to have strong convictions and "to really care about the people affected by their work."

"They care about justice, and they are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get into a bare-knuckle fight if they have to," she says. "I felt at home. I felt I was with like-minded people, and that was a wonderful feeling."

VENTURING SOUTH

Sklar was assistant to the ACLU director of public education from 1989 to 1991, when her then-husband landed a job as an English professor at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway. She was eight months pregnant with their son, Franz Spillenger, when they made the move.

"It was all just a big adventure," Sklar says of that time.

She and Spillenger's father divorced. About a decade later, she was at Vino's with some other single-parent friends when she met Lee Beverly, a mechanical engineer. They married in 2009. Beverly will retire soon from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Sklar decided to return to the workforce a year after her son was born, and once again, by sheer luck there was a job for her with the ACLU.

In Arkansas her predecessor left to take the same position in Texas, and Sklar was hired as interim director here in 1992, then executive director in 1993.

Sklar says she essentially learned her job on the job. She inherited a five-digit budget and a staff of one -- an office manager who worked just three days a week. At the time, the state ACLU had a saying: "We defend an 18th-century document with 19th-century office equipment." That office was in the Boyle Building at Main Street and Capitol Avenue; today it's behind locked doors in a historic, blond-brick building in the 900 block of West Second Street.

"I had the passion, and I knew the issues from working with the national office, but it's a never-ending education because new issues come up all the time," Sklar says.

For example, when she became head of the Arkansas office in 1993, there were no domestic drones, considered to endanger privacy rights, or cyberbullying, which has produced censorship legislation that the ACLU sees as a threat to freedom of speech online.

She relied heavily on board members like lawyer John Burnett for help. As chairman of the affiliate's legal committee, he helps Sklar make decisions about which cases to take and the strategy on those cases.

He also helped hire her.

"It's not for the faint at heart, and so you've got to have that core passion for the cause and the organization, which she has," Burnett says. He saw in her someone who was direct, which has worked to her advantage, he adds.

Geri Rozanski, director of affiliate support and nationwide initiatives for the national ACLU, describes Sklar as persistent, an essential trait in her position.

"Look, we lose a lot in the ACLU, but you have to be willing to come back and figure out another way in or another way around," Rozanski says.

Sklar says, and Rozanski agrees, a great deal of the affiliate's work is taking people's complaints and deciding what to do with them. Every letter and email is answered. Most times, people are looking for assistance -- they don't necessarily have a civil liberties-related concern.

BABY STEPS FOR

A BABY STATE

The affiliate remains one of the smallest in the country, yet its challenges are among the greatest. Under Sklar's charge, the staff has increased to four full-timers, including her, and its legal program has expanded to include a legal director, now Dickson.

Sklar and her team have stopped or fought to alter bills that infringe on the rights of Arkansans and have helped pass legislation to protect their rights, such as the right not to be racially profiled by the police and the right to prevent employers from requiring employees' social media passwords.

The local affiliate also has won legal battles with national significance, Sklar says, including protecting the parenting rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, removing hurdles to ballot access and safeguarding the right to vote and protecting the free speech rights of protesters.

State Sen. Jeremy Hutchinson (R-Benton) says he and Sklar haven't always melded minds on proposed legislation but agreed on a proposal to expedite mental evaluations for inmates who have been incarcerated for months without needed treatment.

"We disagree on most of the hot-button issues, but there's a lot of agreement on First Amendment rights, civil liberties, search and seizure and Fourth and Fifth amendment rights, so we've found surprising common ground," Hutchinson says.

He describes Sklar as "smart, tenacious and dedicated." When they find themselves with opposing views, they easily agree to disagree.

"She doesn't let it become personal or let personalities drive the discourse," he says. "She's very professional and will try to work with you."

He says he admires her style.

"Rita comes with facts and studies and makes a compelling case based on actual data, not just emotion and histrionics," he says.

Lobbyist Don Tilton, principal with The Capital Group, became captivated by Sklar while watching her work on a particularly contentious issue in a legislative committee.

"I thought it was remarkable the way she organized her clients, the case that she made, the way she made the case and the results," he recalls. "When it was over, she had at least slowed the process down long enough for people to decide whether they really wanted to consider what she had to say."

It wasn't an outright victory, Tilton says, but she had made the committee members think. That legislation, regarding whether LGBT people could adopt or foster children, wound up in the ACLU's win column.

"The way she handled it was remarkable," Tilton added.

"One of the best parts of this job is seeing the light bulbs go off," she says of enlightening people about their rights and the rights of others.

RECHARGED AND READY

Don't mistake Sklar's intensity for toughness.

"I'm the biggest sap in the world," she says. "I cry at Hallmark commercials. It's really embarrassing."

Some who know her say they were shocked to discover she's not a lawyer.

"She's always so well prepared and well versed on the statutes and case law," Hutchinson says. "As an attorney I intend that as a compliment."

At day's end she retreats to her garden, where she has raised hundreds of perennials. The first thing she does when she gets home in the summer is take off her shoes, slip out to her nature preserve and consume herself with the "never-ending job" of weeding.

"It removes you from your brain," she says. This year's garden has been even more gratifying than usual, with three birds' nests and a box turtle that has laid eggs.

Her favorite flower? "The ones that live," she jokes. More seriously, she admits gardenias are high on the list.

Her son, 24, lives in Silver Spring, Md., where he is pursuing a career in hip-hop music. She and Beverly share their home with orange tabby Max and a rescued mutt named Zelda.

Sklar loves all kinds of music, particularly the blues, and she finds serenity on the water, floating the Buffalo River and other waterways in her hybrid kayak-canoe.

Creating her private sanctuary and seeking calming outdoor environments have helped her find balance as she goes about her work.

With the organization's centennial anniversary approaching in 2020, Sklar says, she wants to expand the affiliate's impact "not only in the courthouse, but the statehouse," and with educators and motivators, as well. She says she sees the ACLU of Arkansas as an essential part of Arkansas' progressive future.

Rozanski, with the national office, recognizes that Sklar's job is a very visible one that requires her to be "on" from 9 a.m.-6 p.m Monday-Friday. "That can be incredibly fulfilling and also daunting," the executive says. But Sklar is good at finding ways to recharge her batteries.

"I think she still wakes up every morning a little pissed off and ready to go," she says.

High Profile on 08/14/2016

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