Constance Baker Motley

Constance Baker was born on 14 September 1921 in New Haven, Connecticut, to immigrant parents from the Caribbean island of Nevis, and developed an early interest in civil rights law after being denied entry to a local roller-skating rink because of her race as a teenager. She attended New York University before earning her law degree from Columbia Law School in 1946, one of very few Black women in American legal education at the time.

Motley joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund under Thurgood Marshall, becoming a principal legal strategist and litigator on major school desegregation cases throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including writing the original trial complaint for Brown v. Board of Education and arguing ten cases before the US Supreme Court herself, winning nine of them, an extraordinary litigation record establishing her as one of the era's most effective civil rights lawyers.

Motley personally argued major desegregation cases integrating the Universities of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama, working directly on the ground in some of the most dangerous and hostile legal environments of the civil rights era, providing crucial legal representation that translated the movement's broader goals into specific, binding court victories opening previously segregated institutions.

In 1964 Motley was elected to the New York State Senate, becoming the first Black woman elected to that body, and in 1965 became the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, continuing to break institutional barriers even as she moved from civil rights litigation into elected office.

In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson nominated Motley to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and despite significant Senate resistance and a seven-month confirmation delay reflecting opposition to both her race and gender, she was confirmed, becoming the first Black woman appointed as a federal judge in United States history, a landmark judicial breakthrough following her already extraordinary career as a civil rights litigator.

Motley served on the federal bench for nearly four decades, eventually becoming Chief Judge of the Southern District of New York, and continued issuing significant rulings on civil rights, gender discrimination and other major legal issues throughout her judicial career. She died in 2005, remembered as one of the most consequential legal figures of the civil rights era, whose combination of extraordinary litigation success and subsequent judicial breakthrough shaped both the legal dismantling of segregation and the subsequent integration of the federal judiciary itself.