[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 139 (Thursday, October 27, 2005)]
[House]
[Page H9282]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF JUDGE CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY

  (Ms. NORTON asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend her remarks.)
  Ms. NORTON. Madam Speaker, Sadly, I have had to commemorate the lives 
of two important black women who died earlier: C. Delores Tucker, Rosa 
Parks.
  However, this morning I rise to celebrate the life of one of 
America's great lawyers, Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman 
on the Federal bench. That, however, is surely not her greatest public 
service. What greater service to one's country than to have been an 
architect of the legal strategy that brought equality under law to the 
United States. She argued 10 cases before the Supreme Court. Perhaps 
the most notorious was the James Meredith case that integrated the 
University of Mississippi. She made 22 trips into Mississippi for that 
case alone; then, the University of Alabama; also the University of 
Georgia, where she helped Charlane Hunter-Gault integrate that 
university. Charlane Hunter-Gault said that Ms. Motley ``talked about 
the South in those days as if it were a war zone and she was fighting 
in a revolution. No one . . . was going to distract her from carrying 
her task to a successful conclusion.'' Indeed, in the 1960s, the South 
was a war zone not only for activists, but for their lawyers.
  In a car with Medgar Evers, Mr. Evers told her to put away her legal 
pad and not to look back. He, of course, was later assassinated.
  She was so outstanding that every office wanted Mrs. Motley to be 
their first. She was the first woman to serve in the New York Senate, 
the first to serve as Manhattan borough president. She was the first 
woman, and for me perhaps the most important of her firsts, to argue a 
case before the United States Supreme Court, because she inspired a 
whole generation of young lawyers.
  It should astonish us that the first African-American woman was 
appointed to the bench only in 1966, only 40 years ago. It should 
remind us that the integration of the courts of our country is and 
remains part and parcel of establishing equality under the law.

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