Constance Baker Motley
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| New Haven native, first African American woman appointed to the federal judiciary, one of the leaders of the court battle for civil rights.
Constance Baker Motley was born and raised in New Haven where her father worked as chef for a Yale University fraternity. Her parents were West Indian emigrants who encouraged her to become involved in community activities. Motley attended Fisk University and then New York University, receiving an A.B. in Economics in 1943.
After graduating from Columbia Law School in 1946 and marrying Joel Wilson Motley, she began work as a law clerk with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Thurgood Marshall interviewed her for the position and continued to mentor and support her in the years to come. As one of the NAACPís principal trial attorneys Motley played a role in all of the major school segregation cases. She helped write the briefs filed in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and she personally tried the cases resulting in the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi and of Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes to the University of Georgia. In the 1950's and 1960's she argued ten civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, winning nine. She also represented such luminaries as Dr. Martin Luther King and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy. In 1964 Motley became the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate and in 1965 she became the first woman elected to be president of the borough of Manhattan. In 1966 she was named U.S. District Judge, the first African American woman to be appointed to the federal bench. Her nomination was approved only after months of fierce political opposition; President Lyndon Johnson had been forced to withdraw his earlier nomination of Motley to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Constance Baker Motley is the author of dozens of articles on legal and civil rights issues, including several personal tributes to Thurgood Marshall. She has received honorary doctorates from Spelman College, Howard, Princeton, and Brown Universities, and from many Connecticut institutions, including Yale, Trinity, Albertus Magnus, UCONN, and the University of Hartford. Among her many other awards are the NAACP Medal of Honor and her 1993 election to the National Women's Hall of Fame. | |||||||||||
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