[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 16] [Extensions of Remarks] [Pages 21925-21926] [From the U.S. 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 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. [[Page 21926]] 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 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. ____________________