Constance Baker Motley

Constance Baker was born on September 14, 1921, in New Haven, Connecticut. She was the ninth of twelve children of Willoughby Alva Baker and Rachel Huggins Baker, who had emigrated from the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. Her father worked as a chef for the Skull and Bones society at Yale University. Her mother helped found the New Haven chapter of the NAACP. The house was full of books, debate, and the understanding that the law was a thing that could be studied and used.

She was fifteen when a librarian refused her entry to a public beach in Milford, Connecticut, because she was Black. She read the case law herself. She decided then that she would become a lawyer. She graduated near the top of her class from New Haven High School in 1939. There was no money for college. She took jobs as a domestic worker and at the National Youth Administration, and for eighteen months it was not clear whether she would go to college at all.

A white philanthropist named Clarence Blakeslee heard her speak at a community center in New Haven about the segregation of the local Dixwell Community House. He asked the director who she was. Two days later he offered to pay her tuition at any college she could get into. She chose Fisk University, then transferred to New York University to be closer to the legal world she wanted to enter. She graduated from NYU in 1943 with a degree in economics.

She entered Columbia Law School that fall. She was one of a very small number of women in her class and, for most of her three years, the only Black woman. The law school building on Morningside Heights had no women's restroom on the main floor. She walked to a separate building to use one. She clerked part-time at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund starting in 1945 while she was still a student. Thurgood Marshall, then the LDF's chief counsel, hired her as a full staff attorney the following year.

She was the first woman attorney Marshall had hired. She spent the next twenty years at LDF. She worked alongside Robert L. Carter, Jack Greenberg, and Marshall himself on the strategy and briefing that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. She drafted the original trial complaint in the case. She wrote briefs in Hernandez v. Texas, Hamilton v. Alabama, and dozens of appellate filings whose names are now carried in casebooks.

In 1961 she was assigned to integrate the University of Mississippi. The state of Mississippi had spent years blocking James Meredith, a veteran and transfer student, from enrolling. Motley filed, argued, and appealed the case through hostile federal district courts, white mobs outside the courthouses, and a state bar that initially refused to seat her at counsel tables. When the University of Mississippi moved to have her disqualified on the ground that she was not admitted to practice in the state, she sued for admission. She won that motion and then won the case on the merits.

On September 10, 1962, Justice Hugo Black of the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order requiring Mississippi to admit Meredith. Motley had argued the case before the full Fifth Circuit and briefed it for the Supreme Court. Federal marshals walked Meredith into the university on October 1. He enrolled. Rioting that night killed two people and injured many more. Meredith graduated in August 1963. Motley went home to New York and started the next case.

She argued ten cases before the Supreme Court of the United States between 1961 and 1964. She won nine of them. The one she lost, Swain v. Alabama (1965), concerned prosecutors using peremptory challenges to strike Black jurors. The Court denied Swain's claim but left open the door her brief had tried to open. Twenty-one years later, in Batson v. Kentucky (1986), the Court reversed itself and adopted essentially the standard she had argued for.

In 1964 she was elected to the New York State Senate, the first Black woman in that body. In February 1965 the New York City Council elected her Manhattan Borough President, also a first. She served one year. In January 1966, President Lyndon Johnson nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Southern senators, led by James Eastland of Mississippi, held the nomination for seven months. The full Senate confirmed her on August 30, 1966. She was the first Black woman federal judge in the history of the United States.

She served on the Southern District of New York for the next thirty-nine years. She wrote an early opinion that forced the New York Times to admit women sportswriters to the New York Yankees locker room. She ruled repeatedly for prisoners in civil rights cases that reshaped federal corrections law. She presided over employment discrimination suits that set standards followed by district courts in every circuit. She became Chief Judge of the district in 1982 and served in that capacity until 1986, then continued in senior status.

She died on September 28, 2005, at the age of eighty-four. The federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan was renamed the Judge Constance Baker Motley Federal Courthouse in 2021. Her autobiography, Equal Justice Under Law, was published in 1998. Tomiko Brown-Nagin's biography of her, Civil Rights Queen, was published in 2022 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.

Her own summary of her work was straightforward. She had been hired to integrate America under its own Constitution. She did the work case by case. When the courts held the line, she won. When they did not, she filed the appeal and came back.