Constance Baker Motley, 1st Black female federal judge

Posted on Wed, Sep. 28, 2005
Constance Baker Motley, 1st black female federal judge, dies at 84
BY NOREEN MARCUS
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
(Staff researcher Barbara Hijek contributed to this report.)

(KRT) - Constance Baker Motley, who along with Thurgood Marshall provided much of the legal muscle for the civil rights movement before becoming, in 1966, America's first black female federal judge, died Tuesday in New York, a Manhattan court official confirmed Wednesday. She was 84 and still a working member of the judiciary.

"She was one of the civil rights luminaries," said U.S. Magistrate Judge Randolph Treece of Albany, N.Y. "She was ahead of her time. When there was no one else there, she was there."

Born on Sept. 14, 1921, in New Haven, Conn., she was the ninth of 12 children of Willoughby and Rachel Baker, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father was a chef for the exclusive Skull and Bones club at Yale; her mother was a founder of the New Haven NAACP.

Precociously bright but lacking the funds to attend college, the high school graduate considered hairdressing or interior design. That changed when she spoke at a New Haven community center whose white developer, Clarence Blakelee, was so impressed, he paid for her college education, Treece said in a speech he gave in 2002.

She graduated in 1943 from New York University with an economics degree and entered Columbia Law School in 1944. While still a student she met her mentor Marshall, with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and started there as a law clerk. She obtained her law degree in 1946, the same year she married real estate and insurance broker Joel Wilson Motley. Their son, Joel Motley III, was born in 1952.

Over two decades Judge Motley, who rose to principal trial attorney for the NAACP, worked with Marshall on many of the landmark cases that ended segregation and established equal rights for African-Americans.

They pushed the constitutional claims that allowed James Meredith and Charlene Hunter-Gault to attend Southern universities and desegregated many state university systems, including Florida's. They represented Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in campaigns for access to public transportation and accommodations. Judge Motley worked on the legal brief in the Brown vs. Board of Education case and won nine of her 10 arguments before the U.S. Supreme court, according to Treece.

After a brief political career as a New York state senator and Manhattan borough president, Judge Motley was nominated to the federal bench by President Lyndon Johnson. She served as chief judge of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York from 1982 to 1986, when she took senior, or semi-retired, status.

Perhaps her best-known case as a judge involved a professional minority group. She ruled in Ludtke vs. Kuhn (1978) that the New York Yankees could not bar a female sports reporter from their locker room.