An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 10/23/2020
Prelude | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | Email |
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"Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade."
Born in 1921, Constance Baker Motley was fortunate enough to grow up in an integrated public school (at the time a radical notion) in New Haven, CT. Her mother Rachel was a co-founder of the New Haven NAACP and so Constance was exposed to --and inspired by-- the stories of post-Reconstruction civil rights leaders, as well as the writings of such trailblazers as W.E.B. Du Bois (see Lesson #1 in this series). Having also been routinely denied entry to public beaches and skating rinks as a child, Constance fixated on a career in law and in 1944 became the very first Black woman to be accepted into Columbia Law School. It was here that she met and became a lifelong colleague of Thurgood Marshall, at the time the legal defense counsel for the NAACP.
Motley was closely involved with much of the behind-the-scenes legal preparation for Brown v. Board of Education, becoming the first black woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. She also defended the Freedom Riders and other protestors during the early 1960s. In 1964 she became the first woman to be elected into the New York State Senate, and in 1966 --to much opposition-- she accepted an appointment from Pres. Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. District Court; the first-ever Black woman to hold a Federal judgeship.
During her time as a Federal judge, Judge Motley ruled on a number of landmark cases for civil rights and women's equality --among them Belknap v. Leary (1970), citing the NYPD for failing to protect Vietnam war protestors; and Ludtke v. Kuhn (1978), reversing a Major League Baseball policy against women reporters in the locker room. In 1986 Judge Motley was named Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, a position she would hold until her death in 2005.
Homework: view Judge Motley's recollections on Brown at: https://youtu.be/gZy9rTaO9NY
Next page - Lesson 51: Fannie Lou Hamer