Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights Lawyer and Federal Judge, Dies at 84

NEW YORK
When she was 15, Constance Baker Motley was turned away from a

public beach because she was Black. It was only then — even though her mother was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — that the teenager really became interested in civil rights.

She went to law school and found herself fighting racism in landmark segregation cases including Brown v. Board of Education, the Central High School case in Arkansas and the case that let James Meredith enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Motley also broke barriers herself: She was the first Black woman appointed to the federal bench, as well the first elected to the New York state Senate.

Motley, who would have celebrated her 40th anniversary on the bench next year, died recently of congestive heart failure at New York University Downtown Hospital, says her son, Joel Motley III. She was 84.

“She is a person of a kind and stature the likes of which they’re not making anymore,” says Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey, who served with Motley on the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

From 1961 to 1964, Motley won nine of 10 civil rights cases she argued before the Supreme Court.

She began her career with the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, starting in 1945 as a law clerk for Thurgood Marshall, then its chief counsel and later a Supreme Court justice. In 1950, Motley prepared the draft complaint for what would become Brown v. Board of Education.

The Supreme Court ruled in her and her colleagues’ favor in 1954, a decision credited with toppling public school segregation in America while touching off resistance across the country and leading to some of the racial clashes of the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, she personally argued the Meredith case as well as the suit that resulted in the enrollment of two Black students at the University of Georgia.