[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.

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