Alice Athenia Lytle

Alice Athenia Lytle (1939-2018) was an American judge and the first African American woman to serve on California's Superior Court. Lytle graduated from New York's Hunter College with a Bachelor's degree in Physiology and Public Health in 1961 and became a medical technician specializing in pediatric cardiology working first in New York and then in San Francisco. She also created a mentoring program for juvenile wards called the SacraMentor Program and advocated for and created early childhood development programs for teenage mothers, such as the Healthy Teen Mothers Project and the Birthing Project. After a statewide ballot amendment led to the consolidation of the Municipal and Superior Courts of Sacramento in 1998, Gov. Brown appointed Lytle to the Sacramento County Superior Court making her, once again, the first African American woman to serve on the court and served as the only African American woman on the court until shortly before her retirement in 2002. The bill mandated statewide local reporting of racial and identity demographics for all stops performed by police and officers of the peace and reporting of any and all citizen complaints alleging racial or identity profiling. The Advisory Board was tasked with analyzing and reporting on the collected data and making policy suggestions aimed at eliminating racial and identity profiling, increasing diversity, and increasing racial and identity sensitivity in California law enforcement.