[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 23065-23066]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  TRIBUTE TO MRS. CONSTANCE B. MOTLEY

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. BENNIE G. THOMPSON

                             of mississippi

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 18, 2005

  Mr. THOMPSON of Mississippi. Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize 
the life and legacy of Mrs. Constance Baker Motley, Esq., a former 
civil rights lawyer who fought nearly every important civil rights case 
for 2 decades and then became the first black woman to serve as a New 
York State Senator and the first black woman to serve as a federal 
judge.
  In tribute to Mrs. Motley, I would like to submit the following 
excerpt from the Washington Post Article, ``Constance Motley Dies; 
Rights Lawyer, Judge'', written by Joe Holley on Thursday, September 
29, 2005.
  Judge Constance Baker Motley, 84, the first African American woman 
appointed to the federal judiciary and the only woman on the NAACP 
legal team that won the epochal school desegregation decision Brown v. 
Board of Education, died Sept. 21 of congestive heart failure at New 
York University Downtown Hospital. At the time of her death, she was 
senior judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of 
New York.
  Long before she ascended to the federal bench, she was a key figure 
in many of the major legal battles of the civil rights era. She 
represented Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy and other civil 
rights leaders when they were locked up in Southern jail cells. She 
stayed in Medgar Evers's home not long before an assassin killed him in 
his front yard, and she was on the podium at the Lincoln Memorial in 
1963 when King delivered his ``I Have a Dream'' speech.
  As a young lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, 
she helped Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel of the fund, write the 
legal brief for the Brown case and then listened as he delivered his 
argument before the Supreme Court.
  She and her colleagues did not anticipate the unanimous decision, she 
recalled. ``We thought we might come out with five to four, but when it 
was unanimous, we were flabbergasted,'' she said in a 2003 interview 
with an American Bar Association magazine. ``In fact, we thought we 
might even lose. . . . [Chief Justice] Earl Warren did that. He 
understood, having been a politician, that you had to have unanimity, 
because if you had a divided court, the Southerners would still be at 
it. . . . What we did not anticipate was the massive resistance to 
Brown in the South.''
  After the 1954 ruling, she threw herself into what she called ``the 
second civil war.'' Writing hundreds of court papers and legal briefs 
to enforce Brown, she argued 10 school desegregation cases before the 
U.S. Supreme Court, winning nine of them.
  In 1956, she represented Autherine Lucy, the daughter of a black 
tenant farmer who had applied to graduate school at the University of 
Alabama.
  In 1961, she represented Charlayne Hunter (now Hunter-Gault) and 
Hamilton Holmes in their effort to enter the University of Georgia.
  In 1962, she represented James H. Meredith in his arduous but 
ultimately successful battle to gain admission to the University of 
Mississippi. Marshall gave her the case, she said, because she was a 
woman. ``Thurgood's theory was, in the South, they don't bother black 
women because they all have mammies,'' she once said.
  Meredith was admitted after 16 months of legal wrangling, numerous 
court hearings and tortuous legal resistance on the part of Mississippi 
officials, including Gov. Ross Barnett, who eventually was held in 
contempt of court.
  ``She was indomitable,'' said Jack Greenberg, who succeeded Marshall 
as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal and Education Fund and is now a 
professor at Columbia University School of Law. ``She would take on a 
project like opening up the University of Mississippi and just keep 
coming back again and again and again. She was like Grant at Vicksburg. 
She just dug in there and stayed there until they rolled over.''
  In 1963, she represented more than 1,000 black children in Birmingham 
who had been suspended from school for participating in civil rights 
demonstrations. The same year, she led the NAACP's successful effort to 
prevent Gov. George C. Wallace from blocking school desegregation in 
four Alabama counties.
  Both in the courtroom and on the bench, she impressed those who knew 
her with what Greenberg called her presence. ``That Motley woman,'' as 
her Southern antagonists often referred to her, was tall and always 
elegantly dressed. Always well prepared, deeply versed in the 
intricacies of the law, she was soft-spoken and reserved, Greenberg 
recalled, but formidable.
  Her successor, Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey, recalled appearing in 
her courtroom as an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1970s. ``She was 
very calm,'' he said. ``She was the kind of person who could control a 
courtroom because everyone knew who she was.''
  Constance Baker was born in New Haven, Conn., on Sept. 14, 1921, the 
ninth of 12 children born to parents who had migrated earlier in the 
century from the island of Nevis in the West Indies. Her father was a 
cook for Skull & Bones, one of Yale University's elite social clubs.
  Attending New Haven's integrated public schools, she became a 
voracious reader at an early age. She learned about W.E.B. Du Bois and 
other black heroes from lectures she heard at the Episcopal church. 
Reading a book about Abraham Lincoln that she had checked out of the 
New Haven Public Library, she decided at age 15 that she wanted to be a 
lawyer. She was impressed by Lincoln's observation that the legal 
profession was the most difficult.
  Her mother wanted her to be a hairdresser. ``She had no conception of 
a woman wanting to be a lawyer,'' Judge Motley told the ABA magazine.
  After graduating with honors from New Haven High School, she worked 
briefly as a maid before accepting a job with the New Haven branch of 
the National Youth Administration. She happened to give a speech one 
night at the Dixwell Community House, an African American social 
organization, urging that black members be given greater control over 
the facility. In the audience was Clarence Blakeslee, a wealthy white 
contractor and philanthropist who had built the community house. The 
grandson of Abolitionists, he was impressed with her energy, poise and 
eloquence and offered to pay for her education.
  She enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville. On the train headed 
south, she experienced for the first time the reality of segregation 
when she was directed to ride in the Jim Crow car. On her first trip 
home, she brought her parents a souvenir of Southern life, a sign that 
read ``Colored Only.''
  She stayed at Fisk for a year and then transferred in 1942 to New 
York University, where she received a bachelor's degree in economics.
  In 1944, she became one of the first black women accepted at Columbia 
University Law School. During her first year, she met Marshall, who 
offered her a job as law clerk at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund office 
in New York. She received her law degree in 1946 and became a full-
fledged member of the staff. Her early work focused on housing 
discrimination.
  After passing the New York bar examination in 1948, she became 
assistant counsel of the Legal Defense Fund. She got her first 
courtroom experience in 1949 as Marshall's assistant on a Jackson, 
Miss., equal-pay case that an African American teacher had brought 
against the Jackson public school system.
  ``Woman lawyers were a joke in most courthouses and unheard of in 
virtually every place except New York City,'' Judge Motley wrote in Ms. 
Magazine years later. ``The whole town turned out to see the Negro 
lawyers from New York, one of whom [was] a woman.''
  For the next 15 years, she served as a key attorney on dozens of 
school desegregation cases in 11 Southern states and the District. It 
was the best job she ever had, she recalled

[[Page 23066]]

in the ABA interview. ``Plus, we were like a family,'' she said. ``I 
tried a lot of cases before I came on the bench, which is probably more 
exciting. But, you see, I coincided with history as I see it now.''
  After leaving the Legal Defense Fund in 1964, she became the first 
black woman elected to the New York State Senate. The next year, she 
was selected to fill the vacant post of Manhattan borough president and 
then was elected nine months later. Again, she was the first black 
woman to hold the office.
  In January 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson named her to the 
District Court for the Southern District of New York, a region that 
includes Manhattan, the Bronx and six counties north of the city. The 
first African American woman to serve as a Federal judge, she became 
chief judge in 1982. She took senior status, handling a reduced 
caseload, in 1986.
  Several of her rulings stand out, including the 1978 case that 
allowed female reporters to enter the locker rooms of professional 
sports teams. In 1987, she ruled that, without exceptional 
circumstances, suspects cannot be detained more than 24 hours without a 
court ruling that sufficient evidence exists to justify the arrest.
  In addition to numerous articles and essays, she was the author of 
``Equal Justice Under Law: The Life of a Pioneer for Black Civil Rights 
and Women's Rights'' (1988). She was inducted into the National Women's 
Hall of Fame in 1993.
  Survivors include her husband of 59 years, Joel Wilson Motley Jr. of 
New York; a son, Joel Wilson Motley III of Westchester County, N.Y.; 
three sisters; a brother; and three grandchildren.
  I take great pride in commending Mrs. Constance Baker Motley for her 
work to curb racial segregation and to win social justice in this 
country.

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