Constance Baker Motley: A Trailblazer in the Legal Profession

Gary L. Ford Jr., an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York, is the author of Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law (2017) and a co-producer, with Michael Calia and Susan Bailey, of the documentary film Justice Is a Black Woman: The Life and Work of Constance Baker Motley (2012). Ford holds a BA in African American studies from Harvard University, a JD from Columbia University, an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland.

When the name Constance Baker Motley (1921–2005) is mentioned, the response is often, “Who was she?” The answer is: She was a black woman; the ninth of twelve children of Willoughby and Rachel Baker, immigrants from Nevis, British West Indies; the wife of Joel Motley Jr.; the mother of Joel Motley III; and a trailblazer in the legal profession. Motley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 14, 1921. She graduated from Hillhouse High School in 1939 and enrolled at Fisk University in 1941. While traveling south to Fisk, Motley was forced to ride in the “Colored” car on the train. That experience reinforced her determination to become a lawyer and fight to end racial segregation in America. In 1942, Motley transferred to New York University, graduating in 1943. She enrolled at Columbia Law School in February 1944 and received her law degree in June 1946. Motley broke down barriers, overcame gender constraints, and became a litigator, the only woman attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), and the only woman who argued desegregation cases in courts in the racially segregated South during the Civil Rights Movement from 1946 to 1964.

The LDF led the legal challenge to de jure segregation and the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson.[1] Motley criticized the ruling that put the imprimatur of the United States on legal segregation in public accommodations, education, and American society. In her autobiography, Equal Justice under Law, she wrote,

Our Supreme Court recognized, early on, that, although some Africans had been enslaved by Europeans and American colonists, non-enslaved Africans were among the free peoples of the world. This explicit recognition of free Africans as free people occurred in 1841 in the Amistad case. In 1857, however, when asked to determine the status of free Africans in the American community, the Supreme Court noted that our Founding Fathers never contemplated that free Africans would constitute a part of the body politic. The high court said, in dicta, that free Africans in American society had always been regarded as an inferior order of beings and had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. Thus, the Court plainly established the young United States as a racist society.[2]

Motley noted that after the Civil War, “it was necessary to amend the Constitution: to free the African slaves; to confer . . . citizenship on them and to guarantee them equal protection” of the law and the “most basic indicia of citizenship.” She asserted that “whites, particularly in the former slaveholding states, refused to accept Africans as equals” and that the Plessy ruling sanctioned their action and gave a “ringing endorsement to legal segregation and racism.”[3]

Motley won cases that challenged Plessy. Her work affected the success of the Civil Rights Movement. It facilitated the dismantling of Jim Crow and a segregated society. She wrote briefs in Brown v. Board of Education and argued ten desegregation cases in the Supreme Court.[4] She was trial or appellate counsel in fifty-seven cases in the Supreme Court, eighty-two cases in federal courts of appeals, forty-eight cases in federal district courts, and numerous cases in state courts.

The cases that Motley won desegregated housing, transportation, museums, libraries, parks, and public accommodations. She represented protesters who sat at white-only lunch counters and restaurants and won the Supreme Court case that reversed all of their convictions.[5] She represented freedom riders who were arrested and jailed when they rode across the country on buses to test the decision that prohibited segregation in interstate transportation. She represented activists and forced their release when they were locked up in southern jails. She secured the right for blacks to register and vote, to serve on juries, to use bathrooms and drink from water fountains, and to stay in hotels on an equal basis with whites. Motley won cases against the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North and South Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia. She secured the right for blacks to attend all-white public schools, universities, and colleges including the Universities of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Mississippi, and Clemson College. She argued four appeals in one day. Between May 20 and May 27 in 1963, she won a decision to integrate Memphis parks, got a court order to admit black students to the University of Alabama, and represented Dr. Martin Luther King and helped maintain support for his Birmingham Campaign and the Civil Rights Movement when she obtained a ruling reinstating 1,081 children who had been expelled from school for demonstrating with him.

Racism and sexism were obstacles in Motley’s work in the South. On many occasions, to accomplish a task as simple as making a telephone call while she was conducting a trial, she had to find and use pay telephones. The courthouse was usually located in the center of the Jim Crow zone. Black attorneys did not have offices near the courthouse and white lawyers did not permit her to use their telephones. As a result, she had to walk long distances before she crossed invisible lines that divided black and white communities and found telephones she could use. In court, Motley endured the antics of hostile segregationist lawyers and judges who turned their backs and would not look at her when she argued cases. She faced the prospect of violence and “stayed in homes that had been bombed. . . . [H]er host in Mississippi, the civil rights activist Medgar Evers, was murdered by a sniper” who hid behind bushes at his home.[6] Motley endured physical threats and encountered hostile mobs. In Mississippi and Alabama, black men with guns surrounded the houses she slept in for protection.

Motley’s position as a change agent has been marginalized in traditional historical narratives. When scholars wrote about cases she had won, they focused on her clients, many of whom became celebrated heroes. For example, historians have written about how brave James Meredith was for integrating the University of Mississippi, where violence erupted and people were killed. However, they did not explore Motley’s experiences in the trial court, the court of appeals, the Supreme Court, or the constant trips—more than twenty-one—she made to Mississippi (or the emotional stress and physical danger she endured) in order to win the case and actually get Meredith enrolled. She was right there in the thick of it with Meredith. Historians have also written about the desegregation of the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia, and other institutions that were forced to admit blacks after Motley won cases against them, but they failed to explore her experiences in securing the victories. In addition, historians have written about marches led by Dr. King and other activists, but they did not explore the work that Motley performed in the courts to remove injunctions or to obtain the protesters’ release from jail when they were arrested.

Due to the lack of attention paid to Motley and her work, many people, including those she represented, don’t even know who she was or what she achieved on their behalf. The number includes thousands of black graduates from formerly all-white public schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools that were forced to desegregate and admit blacks after she won cases against them. The number also includes thousands who were arrested and jailed for participating in freedom rides, sit-ins, marches, and other demonstrations. Many of them know that the LDF represented them, but they do not know that it was Motley who actually went to court in the South, won the cases, attained their release from jail, overturned their convictions, and desegregated formerly all-white institutions—dismantling Jim Crow.

Motley worked behind the scenes in nontraditional political spaces for women; she was a litigator in courtrooms across America at a time when the legal profession was almost exclusively populated with white men. Black lawyers and women lawyers were almost nonexistent. When she tried a case in Mississippi in 1948, it was such a novelty that the entire town turned out to see the black lawyers from New York, one of whom was a woman.

In 1964, Motley transitioned to political office and was elected as the first black woman to serve in the New York State Senate. In 1965, she became the first woman to sit on the New York Board of Estimate and then the first woman ever—black or white—to be elected Manhattan Borough president. That made her the highest-ranking black woman in American politics.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Motley to be the first woman to serve as a judge in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. That resulted in her becoming the first black woman federal judge. Motley served nearly four decades, decided 2,500 cases, and in 1982, became the first woman to serve as chief judge of the court. In 1986, she assumed senior status, a position she held until her death on September 28, 2005.

Through her agency in the courts and pursuit of equal justice under law, Motley broke down political, social, and professional barriers in American society. The desegregation cases she won opened all public institutions, facilities, and accommodations to both blacks and whites on an equal basis and without regard to race. Her actions as a trailblazer in the legal profession created opportunities for women—both black and white—to work in government and corporate offices and as law professors, judges, and business executives, and become political leaders, roles formerly performed only by men.

This essay was originally published in the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Women Who Made History: Historians Present Documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection (2020).