Constance Baker Motley: Pioneer of Justice and Civil Rights

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When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case in May 1954, the struggle for school desegregation was just beginning. Dozens of legal battles were required to enforce the ruling over the years, and one of the leading powers behind them was a young, black attorney named Constance Baker Motley.

Constance Baker Motley was born on September 14th, 1921 in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the ninth of twelve children to Rachel Huggins and Willoughby Alva Baker, both immigrants from Nevis, the British West Indies.

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She grew up in a West Indian community in New Haven, Connecticut. Most members of New Haven’s black community, including Motley’s parents, worked as domestics or in service jobs for Yale University (Cole and Greenaway 7). Her mother founded the New Haven National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; her father, was a chef for student organizations (Martin). Motley was excellent in her studies, and filled in the gaps in her knowledge of black history and culture through her attendance at an Episcopal church, where the minister delivered speeches about the writings of W.

E. B. Du Bois and other prominent African American scholars. At age 15, after reading a book in which Abraham Lincoln said the most difficult occupation was the legal profession, she decided that she wanted to pursue legal studies (Cole and Greenaway 7). Growing up in New Haven, Motley attended the integrated public schools, but was exposed to racism. In two separate incidents she was denied entrance, once to a skating rink, the other to a local beach (Cole and Greenaway 6).

These incidents stimulated her interest in civil rights and prompted her to become involved in community affairs. For a short period, she served as president of the NAACP youth council and secretary of the New Haven Adult Community Council, both wanted to eliminate racial discrimination. “My interest in civil rights [was] a very early interest which developed when I was in high school. The fact that I was a Black, a woman, and a member of a large, relatively poor family was also the base of this great ambition [to enter the legal profession].”

In 1939, she graduated with honors from Hillhouse High School. Though she had already had a desire to practice law, Motley’s family lacked the means it took for her to attend college, and instead she went to work for the National Youth Administration. One night, she delivered a speech at the Dixwell Community House, a local social organization. The speech focused on how black members should be given greater control over the facility's operation. It was through this work that she encountered a local businessman and philanthropist Clarence Blakeslee, who offered to pay for her education, after hearing her speak.

During her induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame, Motley remembered Blakeslee’s generosity and thanked him in a speech. '[Blakeslee] had made millions of dollars, and what he did with those millions was to help educate black Americans,' the New Yorker quoted her as saying. 'Clarence Blakeslee was a white man responsible for my being here today (Cole and Greenaway 7).”

She spent a year at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, then transferred to New York University in 1942, earning her bachelor’s in economics from its Washington Square College in 1943. In February 1944 she began her legal studies at Columbia Law School (Hine, ch. 21). She graduated in 1946, the same year she married Joel Wilson Motley, Jr., a real estate and insurance broker. Their son, Joel Motley III, was born in 1952. During her second year at Columbia Law School, Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall hired her as a law clerk.

Analysis of the Historical Contributions of Constance Baker Motley

Constance Baker Motley became the first black woman ever to attend Columbia University Law School. She first met Thurgood Marshall in October 1945 when he hired her as a law clerk during her second year. Marshall assigned her to work on the hundreds of army cases filed after World War II. Motley recalled, “From the first day I knew that this was where I wanted to be. I never bothered interviewing anywhere else. But for this fortuitous event, I do not think that I would have gotten very far as a lawyer. Women were simply not hired in those days (Hine, ch. 21).”

After graduating from Columbia's Law School in 1946, Motley was hired by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) as a civil rights lawyer. Motley’s career brought her many high profile cases often involving school desegregation. In 1950 she was named assistant counsel and in 1961 she became associate counsel. She worked on litigation for the 1954 school desegregation case, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and was the first black woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. In 1956, she helped Autherine Lucy, the daughter of a black tenant farmer who had completed her undergraduate education at a segregated college, win the right to attend graduate school at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa (Encyclopedia). Six years later, Motley won national recognition for representing James H. Meredith during his long but successful battle to gain admission to the University of Mississippi. The case, which required nearly 15 court hearings and cost the fund an estimated $30,000, was considered a major victory for civil rights (Encyclopedia). Other important successes followed for Motley. She represented multiple students, 'Freedom Fighters' and the legendary Martin Luther King Jr. so that King and his followers could march in Albany, Georgia for desegregation of public transportation and accommodations throughout the South from 1961 to 1963. Motley brought many of these civil rights cases to higher courts. Between 1961 and 1964, she argued ten civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning nine.

Later Motley entered politics. She was the first African-American woman to be elected to the New York State Senate on February 4, 1964. She took her seat in the 174th New York State Legislature, was re-elected in November 1964 to the 175th New York State Legislature, and resigned her seat when she was chosen on February 23, 1965, as Manhattan Borough President—-the first woman in that position (Martin). In November 1965, she was elected to succeed herself for a full four-year term. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Motley to the United States District Court in 1966, making her the first African American woman, and women, to hold a federal judgeship. It was the nation's largest federal court covering Manhattan, the Bronx, and six New York counties (Martin). Among her many controversial decisions was the infamous 'locker room case,' Ludtke v. Kuhn (1978), in which she ruled that a woman reporter be admitted to the New York Yankees' locker room. She served as Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York from 1982 to 1986, assuming her senior status on September 30.

In October of 1993, Motley was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Over the course of her long career, she received over 70 awards and 8 honorary degrees from universities. Judge Constance Baker Motley died of congestive heart failure on September 28, 2005, at the age of 84 (Martin). She will be remembered as a fearless defender of justice, who fulfilled her desire to change the world for the better.