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Richard "Rick" Rice was born in 1940 and grew up in Huntington Beach, California. Rice attended the University of California at Berkeley before moving to New York City and then to Seattle in the early 1970s. Rice was active in the student, anti-war, and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

Rice worked as a bus driver for Metro Transit for four years, where he was an active union member and a member of a rank-and-file caucus committe. Rice participated in a Metro Transit strike in 1974. During the 70s and 80s, Rice was an activist in several local organizations such as Committee for Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the Venceremos Brigade, and the Anti-Apartheid movement. Rice participated in weekly protests in front of the South African consulate in Seattle during this period.

His wife, Roselynn Harrell (also known as Rose Woodward) was also a Seattle metro driver and a social and labor activist. Harrell was involved in South Seattle Community College's Women's Employment Network and was a welder. Rice and Harrell worked for two years at a Uniroyal and Firestone tire plant in Long Beach California in an effort to organize it politically as an outgrowth of their activism as members of the socialist organization Line of March. Line of March was a Marxist-Leninist organization that inspired many New Left student activists to become "proletarianized" workers who would find work in industry and radicalize other workers.

During the 1990s, Rice was active in the Seattle area efforts to create a Labor Party and attended conferences on behalf of the effort. Rice's second wife, Kate Thompson is an artist and an activist. Thompson was a co-founder and co-owner of Storefront Press in Seattle. As of 2014, Rice lives in Mexico.