By Lee A. Daniels

For nearly two decades in the middle of the twentieth century, against daunting odds and the ever-present threat of lethal violence, she helped carry the torch of freedom into places where tyranny reigned. Later, she proved her remarkable commitment to public service could work to equally great effect in the arenas of politics, and the federal judiciary. Her name was Constance Baker Motley, and she was one of America’s great public citizens.

The audience views the documentary on the life and career of Constance Baker Motley. Photography by special permission of Robert A. Lisak

Judge Motley died in 2005 at 84, and though her death provoked a great outpouring of tribute at the time, it’s since become clear to many that there is much more meaning to be mined from a deeper exploration of her career as civil rights activist, elected official, and long-serving federal judge.

That realization moved Marilyn Ford, a law professor at Quinnipiac University School of Law and Kate Stith, a law professor at nearby Yale Law School, and several of their colleagues to sponsor a symposium last Friday on Judge Motley’s achievements at Quinnipiac’s campus in Hamden, Connecticut.

“We’ve come together to celebrate Judge Motley’s life and career,” Professor Ford said to an overflow audience of nearly 600 that thronged the auditorium of the university’s Alumni Hall. “We want to gain a deeper appreciation of what she accomplished, and we want to spread knowledge of her to our young people, to inspire them as she has inspired you.”

Juan Williams, the journalist and political analyst, characterized the symposium as a “family gathering.”

Indeed, the nearly day-long event was suffused with a decidedly, and sometimes poignantly, intimate quality that underscored the truth of that observation. Several of Judge Motley’s family, including her son, Joel Wilson Motley III, were present. So, too, were colleagues and former clients from her Movement days as a crusading attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF); political allies from her brief but remarkable stint as a New York state senator from Manhattan and then Manhattan Borough President; and former law clerks from her 38-year career as a judge  of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, the country’s largest federal trial bench.

Williams introduced a brief, documentary-in-progress about Judge Motley, and then three panel discussions and several brief commentaries helped give color and shape to the career of a woman who, seen from a distance, seemed larger than life.

After all, Elaine Jones, a former LDF President and Director-Counsel, reminded the audience during the first panel, Judge Motley had argued ten cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and “won nine of them immediately” – her emphasis on the last word drawing a knowing laugh from many in the audience. In the early 1960s Motley’s only loss before the court came in a 1966 case, Swain v. Alabama, that sought to have the Court declare the deliberate exclusion of blacks and other people of color from juries unconstitutional. In 1986, the Court, in Batson v. Kentucky, reversed that decision. “So,” said Jones declaratively. “Connie Motley won that case, too. It just took longer.”

Drew Days, a Yale Law professor and former U.S. Solicitor General who first met in 1970, when he was a new LDF lawyer, spoke of her “high standards and prodigious capacity for work.” During her 18-year LDF career, she was a trail or appellate counsel for 57 Supreme Court cases and 82 cases in U.S. Courts of Appeals. Astonishingly, Motley once argued four Appeals Court cases in one day.

She superbly handled this formidable workload among the small collection of brilliant LDF attorneys of that era while sharing child-raising duties with her husband, Joel Wilson Motley, Jr., a real-estate entrepreneur.

(l to R) Calvin Trillin, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Photography by special permission of Robert A. Lisak

Constance Baker Motley’s professional career was one of “firsts:” the first black women to be a New York State Senator; the first black woman to serve as Manhattan Borough President, then a powerful city government post; the first black woman to be a federal judge. And before those firsts, she was undoubtedly the first black woman lawyer to practice in many Southern courtrooms.

That was the result of her innumerable trips to the segregated South to try cases and provide front-line legal counsel in some of the most searing episodes of the civil rights struggle. Among the cases she played leading roles in were the Brown school segregation case; the unsuccessful attempt in 1956 to integrate the University of Alabama; the Little Rock school integration battle at Central High School that same year; and the successful attempts to integrate the Universities of Georgia and Mississippi in the early 1960s.

Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law professor and LDF board member, said “there wasn’t a city or state in the South that was safe from her zealous advocacy—and the danger she faced has been understated.”

Some sense of the danger that was always close at hand in the South became apparent during a second panel discussing the 1961 integration of the University of Georgia. It consisted of Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., and Calvin Trillin, the writer. Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was the moderator.

Hunter-Gault, and the late Dr. Hamilton Holmes, were the two students who volunteered to try to crack the university’s color barrier. Jordan was then a newly-minted law school graduate who, working under Motley’s direction, found a critical document that made the university’s desegregation inevitable, and escorted Hunter-Gault through the raging mobs of whites. Trillin, now of The New Yorker, was then covering the desegregation crisis for Time magazine and became good friends with both Jordan and Hunter-Gault. Their reminiscences, with humorous anecdotes about themselves and even Motley, shared equal billing with ones illuminating the latent danger of the moment.

Subsequently, Douglas Schoen, the campaign consultant and author, surprised many knowledgeable about Judge Motley’s legal career with a brief but penetrating discussion of her short career in elected politics—pointing out that, in the mid-1960s when she held office, she was the highest-ranking black female elected official in the U.S.

Lani Guinier, of Harvard Law School, noted that Motley’s example had and continues to be a powerful inspiration to women students and faculty in law schools, on the federal bench and throughout the legal profession and in other fields as well.

And James B. Farmer, chief of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, in Boston, and Professor William E. Forbath, of the University of Texas, examined Motley’s record as a jurist and a mentor to dozens of law clerks during her long judicial career.

At its end, it’s fair to say the symposium lived up to its premise. It left attendees with the certainty that Constance Baker Motley’s career and its impact on American society deserves further study. Born into an American society laced with a vicious inequality, her commitment to advancing democracy and justice through the legal system—both as advocate and jurist—remains a compelling testament to the faith she and those she represented had in the capacity of the American system to change for the better when confronted with the stern truth and courage.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, Inc. and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.