Motley, Constance Baker

September 14, 1921

Constance Baker Motley was the first African-American woman to be elected to the New York State Senate, the first woman to be elected Manhattan borough president, and the first black woman to be appointed a federal judge. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. She graduated from high school with honors in 1939 but could not afford college. Impressed by her participation in a public discussion and by her high school record, Clarence Blakeslee, a local white businessman, offered to pay her college expenses.

Motley enrolled at Fisk University in February 1941, transferred to New York University, and received a bachelor's degree in economics in October 1943. She enrolled at Columbia Law School in February 1944 and graduated in 1946. In 1945, during her final year at Columbia, she began to work part-time as a law clerk for Thurgood Marshall at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund and continued there full-time after graduation, eventually becoming one of its associate counsels. Because Marshall's staff was small and there was little work being done in civil rights, Motley had the unusual opportunity to try major cases before circuit courts of appeal and the United States Supreme Court. From 1949 to 1964, she tried cases, primarily involving desegregation, in eleven southern states and the District of Columbia, including cases that desegregated the University of Mississippi (Meredith v. Fair, 1962) and the University of Georgia (Homes v. Danner, 1961). She helped write the briefs for the landmark desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and won nine of the ten cases she argued before the Supreme Court.

She left the NAACP in 1964 to run for the New York State Senate, to which she was elected in February 1964, becoming only the second woman elected to that body. She left the Senate in February 1965, when she was elected Manhattan borough president, becoming only the third black to hold this office. On January 25, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973; served 1963–69) appointed her to the bench of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. She was confirmed in August 1966, becoming both the first black and the first woman to be a federal judge in that district. On June 1, 1982, she became the chief judge of her court, serving in this position until October 1, 1986, when she became a senior judge. Her memoir, Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography, was published in 1998. Five years later, Motley was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, she was an active member of the Just The Beginning Foundation, an organization that commemorates and documents African-American lawyers and judges.

See also Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ; Marshall, Thurgood; Politics and Political Parties, U.S.

Bibliography

Lanker, Brian. I Dream a World. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989.

Motley, Constance Baker. "Some Reflections on My Career." Law and Inequality 6 (May 1988): 35–40.

Motley, Constance Baker. Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998.

siraj ahmed (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005