Constance Baker Motley

Constance Baker was born on the fourteenth of September 1921 at New Haven, Connecticut, the ninth of twelve children of Willoughby Alva Baker and Rachel Huggins Baker, both of Nevisian descent who had emigrated to New Haven in 1903. Her father worked as a steward at the Skull and Bones society of Yale University; her mother was a founder of the New Haven NAACP branch. She was educated at the New Haven public schools and graduated from the New Haven High School in 1939 at the top of her class. She entered Fisk University in 1939 on a scholarship to Fisk arranged with the Black businessman Clarence Blakeslee — who had heard her speak at a New Haven Black community-centre meeting on the closure of an integrated New Haven beach and offered to pay her education through to a law degree.

She transferred from Fisk to New York University in 1941, took the bachelor's at NYU in 1943, and completed the LL.B. at Columbia Law School in 1946. She joined the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund directly from law school as the only woman attorney on its staff, working at the desk adjoining Thurgood Marshall's (placed in this archive) office for the following twenty years.

She drafted the original complaint in Brown v. Board of Education and argued ten Supreme Court cases for the LDF — winning nine, the second-highest victory rate among the LDF advocates of her era. Her decisive case was Meredith v. Fair (1962) — the case desegregating the University of Mississippi at Oxford. She also argued the Supreme Court cases that admitted Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes to the University of Georgia in 1961, Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama in 1963, and Harvey Gantt to Clemson University the same year.

She was elected to the New York State Senate in 1964 — the first African American woman to serve in any state's senate — and to the Manhattan Borough Presidency in 1965, the first Black woman to serve as a Manhattan borough president. President Lyndon Johnson appointed her on the twenty-fifth of August 1966 to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The Senate confirmed her on the thirtieth of August 1966 after a six-month hold by southern senators. She served on the Southern District for the following thirty-nine years — including as Chief Judge from 1982 to 1986 and as Senior Judge from 1986 to her death.

She died at New York on the twenty-eighth of September 2005, at eighty-four.

She is honored here as the first African American woman federal judge.