[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 124 (Thursday, September 29, 2005)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1993-E1995]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY'S LIFE AND LEGACY
______
HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL
of new york
in the house of representatives
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commemorate the life and
legacy of Judge Constance Baker Motley who died September 21, 2005.
Constance Baker Motley had a remarkable career as a public servant,
achieving success both as an elected official and as a Federal judge.
She made history and contributed greatly to the widening of
opportunities for minorities and women. Judge Motley was the first
woman and first African-American woman to be appointed to the United
States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the
largest Federal trial bench in the country; the first African-American
woman to be elected to the New York State Senate and the first woman to
the Manhattan Borough Presidency.
Constance Baker Motley was born on September 14, 1921 in New Haven,
CT, where her father worked as chef for a Yale University fraternity.
Her parents were West Indian emigrants who encouraged her to excel in
school and to become involved in community activities. Clarence
Blakeslee, a wealthy white contractor and philanthropist was so
impressed by her that he paid for her college education. She attended
Fisk University and graduated from New York University in 1943. In
1946, she received her law degree from Columbia University, and married
real estate and insurance broker, Joel Wilson Motley. She also began
work as a law clerk with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Thurgood Marshall
[[Page E1994]]
interviewed her for the position and continued to mentor and support
her in the years to come.
As one of the NAACP's 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 10 civil rights cases before the Supreme Court, winning 9. 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.
Judge Constance Baker Motley has truly been a trailblazer in the
advancement of civil rights for all Americans, and a pioneer in
breaking racial and gender barriers within the once homogeneous legal
arenas. She is truly not only an African-American ``shero,'' she is an
American icon as well. Judge Motley leaves behind her husband of 59
years, Joel Wilson Motley, her son Joel Motley III; three sisters; a
brother; and three grandchildren.
I submit to you two obituaries from the September 29th, 2005 edition
of the New York Times and from the same edition of the Washington Post.
[From the New York Times, Sept. 29, 2005]
Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights Trailblazer, Dies at 84
(By Douglas Martin)
Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights lawyer who fought
nearly every important civil rights case for two decades and
then became the first black woman to serve as a federal
judge, died yesterday at NYU Downtown Hospital in Manhattan.
She was 84.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Isolde Motley,
her daughter-in-law.
Judge Motley was the first black woman to serve in the New
York State Senate, as well as the first woman to be Manhattan
borough president, a position that guaranteed her a voice in
running the entire city under an earlier system of local
government called the Board of Estimate.
Judge Motley was at the center of the firestorm that raged
through the South in the two decades after World War II, as
blacks and their white allies pressed to end the segregation
that had gripped the region since Reconstruction. She visited
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail, sang freedom
songs in churches that had been bombed, and spent a night
under armed guard with Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader
who was later murdered.
But her metier was in the quieter, painstaking preparation
and presentation of lawsuits that paved the way to fuller
societal participation by blacks. She dressed elegantly,
spoke in a low, lilting voice and, in case after case, earned
a reputation as the chief courtroom tactician of the civil
rights movement.
Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama and other staunch
segregationists yielded, kicking and screaming, to the
verdicts of courts ruling against racial segregation. These
huge victories were led by the N.A.A.C.P.'s Legal Defense and
Education Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, for which Judge
Motley, Jack Greenberg, Robert Carter and a handful of other
underpaid, overworked lawyers labored.
In particular, she directed the legal campaign that
resulted in the admission of James H. Meredith to the
University of Mississippi in 1962. She argued 10 cases before
the United States Supreme Court and won nine of them.
Judge Motley won cases that ended segregation in Memphis
restaurants and at whites-only lunch counters in Birmingham,
Ala. She fought for King's right to march in Albany, Ga. She
played an important role in representing blacks seeking
admission to the Universities of Florida, Georgia, Alabama
and Mississippi and Clemson College in South Carolina.
She helped write briefs in the landmark school
desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and in
later elementary-school integration cases.
Judge Motley was a tall, gracious and stately woman whose
oft-stated goal was as simple as it was sometimes elusive:
dignity for all people. Her personal approach was also
dignified. When a reporter wrote that she had demanded some
action by the court, she soon corrected him:
``What do you mean `I demanded the court'? You don't
demand, you pray for relief or move for some action.''
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, whose admission to the University
of Georgia was engineered by Mrs. Motley's legal finesse,
described her courtroom cunning.
``Mrs. Motley's style could be deceptive, often challenging
a witness to get away with one lie after another without
challenging them,'' she wrote in her book ``In My Place,''
published in 1992. ``It was as if she would lull them into an
affirmation of their own arrogance, causing them to relax as
she appeared to wander aimlessly off into and around left
field, until she suddenly threw a curveball with so much
skill and power it would knock them off their chair.''
As a black woman practicing law in the South, she endured
gawking and more than a few physical threats. A local paper
in Jackson, Miss., derided her as ``the Motley woman.''
In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her as a
judge on the United States District Court for the Southern
District of New York at the urging of Senator Robert F.
Kennedy of New York, a Democrat, and with the support of
Senator Jacob K. Javits, a Republican. The opposition of
Southern senators like James O. Eastland, a Mississippi
Democrat, was beaten back, and her appointment was confirmed.
She became chief judge of the district in 1982 and senior
judge in 1986.
Constance Baker was born on Sept. 14, 1921, in New Haven,
the ninth of 12 children. Her parents came from the tiny
Caribbean island Nevis at the beginning of the 20th century.
Her father worked as a chef for various Yale University
student organizations, including Skull and Bones. She
attended local schools in what was then an overwhelmingly
white community.
One of her first experiences with discrimination came at
15, when she was turned away from a public beach because she
was black.
She read books dealing with black history and became
president of the local N.A.A.C.P. youth council. She decided
that she wanted to be a lawyer, but her family lacked money
to send their many children to college. After high school,
she struggled to earn a living as a domestic worker.
When she was 18, she made a speech at local African-
American social center that was heard by Clarence W.
Blakeslee, a white businessman and philanthropist who
sponsored the center. He was impressed and offered to finance
her education.
She decided to attend Fisk University, a black college in
Nashville, partly because she had never been to the South. In
Nashville, she encountered a rigidly segregated society, and
brought her parents a poignant souvenir: a sign that read
``Colored Only.''
After a year and a half at Fisk, she transferred to New
York University. After graduation in 1943, she entered
Columbia Law School, where she began to work as a volunteer
at the N.A.A.C.P.'s Legal Defense and Education Fund, an
affiliate of the National Organization for the Advancement of
Colored People that Mr. Marshall and his mentor, Charles
Houston, had created in 1939.
After she graduated in 1946, she began to work full time
for the civil rights group at a salary of $50 a week. She
worked first on housing cases, fighting to break the
restrictive covenants that barred blacks from white
neighborhoods.
Also in 1946, she married Joel Wilson Motley Jr., a New
York real estate broker. He survives her, as does their son,
Joel III, who lives in Scarborough, N.Y.; three
grandchildren; her brother Edmund Baker of Florida; and her
sisters Edna Carnegie, Eunice Royster and Marian Green, all
of New Haven.
Mr. Marshall had no qualms about sending her into the
tensest racial terrain, precisely because she was a woman.
She said she believed that was why she was assigned to the
Meredith case in 1961.
``Thurgood says that the only people who are safe in the
South are the women--white and Negro,'' she said in
an interview with Pictorial Living, the magazine of The
New York Journal-American, in 1965. ``I don't know how
he's got that figured. But, so far, I've never been
subjected to any violence.''
Mr. Meredith's admission to the University of Mississippi
in September 1962 was a major victory for the civil rights
movement. Mrs. Motley worked on the case for 18 months before
Mr. Meredith's name was even seen in the papers.
She made 22 trips to Mississippi as the case dragged on.
Judge Motley once called the day Mr. Meredith accepted his
diploma in 1963 the most thrilling in her life.
She said her greatest professional satisfaction came with
the reinstatement of 1,100 black children in Birmingham who
had been expelled for taking part in street demonstrations in
the spring of 1963.
In February 1964, Mrs. Motley's high-level civil rights
profile drew her into politics. A Democratic State Senate
candidate from the Upper West Side was ruled off the ballot
because of an election-law technicality. She accepted the
nomination on the condition that it would not interfere with
her N.A.A.C.P. work and handily defeated a Republican to
become the first black woman elected to the State Senate. She
was re-elected that November.
She remained in the job until February 1965, when she was
chosen by unanimous vote of the City Council to fill a one-
year vacancy
[[Page E1995]]
as Manhattan borough president. In citywide elections nine
months later, she was re-elected to a full four-year term
with the endorsement of the Democratic, Republican and
Liberal Parties.
As borough president, she drew up a seven-point program for
the revitalization of Harlem and East Harlem, securing
$700,000 to plan for those and other underprivileged areas of
the city.
After becoming a federal judge in 1966, Judge Motley ruled
in many cases, but her decisions often reflected her past.
She decided on behalf of welfare recipients, low-income
Medicaid patients and a prisoner who claimed to have been
unconstitutionally punished by 372 days of solitary
confinement, whom she awarded damages.
She continued to try cases after she took senior status.
Her hope as a judge was that she would change the world for
the better, she said.
``The work I'm doing now will affect people's lives
intimately,'' she said in an interview with The New York
Times in 1977, ``it may even change them.''
____
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 29, 2005]
Civil Rights Lawyer Baker Motley Dies
(By Larry Neumeister)
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 NAACP--
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 one
elected to the New York state Senate.
Motley, who would have celebrated her 40th anniversary on
the bench next year, died Wednesday of congestive heart
failure at NYU Downtown Hospital, said 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,'' said Chief Judge Michael
Mukasey in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where Motley
served.
From 1961 to 1964, Motley won nine of 10 civil rights cases
she argued before the Supreme Court.
``Judge Motley had the strength of a self-made star,''
federal Judge Kimba Wood said. ``As she grew, she was
unfailingly optimistic and positive--she never let herself be
diverted from her goal of achieving civil rights, even
though, as she developed as a lawyer, she faced almost
constant condescension from our profession due to her being
an African-American woman.''
Motley, who spent two decades with the NAACP's Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, started out there in 1945 as a
law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, then its chief counsel and
later a Supreme Court justice. In 1950, she prepared the
draft complaint for what would become Brown v. Board of
Education.
In her autobiography, ``Equal Justice Under Law,'' Motley
said defeat never entered her mind. ``We all believed that
our time had come and that we had to go forward.''
The Supreme Court ruled in her and her colleagues' favor in
1954 in 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.
``Mrs. Motley's style could be deceptive, often allowing a
witness to get away with one lie after another without
challenging him,'' one of the students, journalist Charlayne
Hunter-Gault, wrote in her 1992 book, ``In My Place.'' But
she would ``suddenly threw a curve ball with so much skill
and power that she would knock them off their chair.''
Motley also argued the 1957 case in Little Rock, Ark., that
led President Eisenhower to call in federal troops to protect
nine black students at Central High.
Also in the early 1960s, she successfully argued for 1,000
school children to be reinstated in Birmingham, Ala., after
the local school board expelled them for demonstrating. She
represented ``Freedom Riders'' who rode buses to test the
Supreme Court's 1960 ruling prohibiting segregation in
interstate transportation. During this time, she represented
the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as well, defending his right
to march in Birmingham and Albany, Ga.
Motley and the Legal Defense and Education Fund, committed
to a careful strategy of dismantling segregation through the
courts, were amazed by the emergence of more militant tactics
such as lunch-counter sit-ins, but she came to believe that
litigation was not the only road to equality.
Recalling a 1963 visit to King in jail, she remarked, ``It
was then I realized that we did indeed have a new civil
rights leader--a man willing to die for our freedom.''
Motley was born in New Haven, Conn., the ninth of 12
children. Her mother, Rachel Baker, was a founder of the New
Haven chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. Her father, Willoughby Alva Baker, worked
as a chef for student organizations at Yale University.
It was the beach incident that solidified the course her
life would take.
Though her parents could not afford to send her to college,
a local philanthropist, Clarence W. Blakeslee, offered to pay
for her education after hearing her speak at a community
meeting.
Motley earned a degree in economics in 1943 from New York
University, and three years later, got her law degree from
Columbia Law School.
In the late 1950s, Motley took an interest in politics and
by 1964 had left the NAACP to become the first black woman to
serve in the New York Senate.
In 1965, she became the first woman president of the
borough of Manhattan, where she worked to promote integration
in public schools.
The following year, President Johnson nominated her to the
federal bench in Manhattan. She was confirmed nine months
later, though her appointment was opposed by conservative
federal judges and Southern politicians.
Over the next four decades, Motley handled a number of
civil rights cases, including her decision in 1978 allowing a
female reporter to be admitted to the New York Yankees'
locker room.
Motley is survived by her husband and son, three sisters
and a brother.
____________________