Black-History.com is in its founding phase. Join the founding subscriber list →
Civil Rights Era · Law

Constance Baker Motley

1921 – 2005

NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigator; first Black woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court and first Black woman appointed a federal judge (1966).

Constance Baker Motley, half-length portrait, April 1965, soon after she became Manhattan borough president
Fred Palumbo, New York World-Telegram and the Sun, April 1965. Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Constance Baker Motley spent two decades as a trial and appellate lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, helping to prepare Brown v. Board of Education and then enforcing it in court, campus by campus, across the South. She was the first Black woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, where she won nine of her ten cases, and in 1966 she became the first Black woman appointed to the federal bench.

At a Glance

Born
14 September 1921, New Haven, Connecticut
Died
28 September 2005, New York, New York
Birth name
Constance Baker
Known for
Meredith v. Fair (1962), integrating the University of Mississippi; ten Supreme Court arguments, nine won; U.S. District Judge, Southern District of New York (1966–2005)
HBCU ties
Fisk University (Attended for a year before transferring to New York University)
Fields
Law · Civil Rights · Politics
Era
Civil Rights Era

Early Life

Constance Baker was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 14 September 1921, one of twelve children of Willoughby Alva Baker and Rachel Huggins Baker, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father worked as a chef. She graduated from New Haven’s Hillhouse High School in 1939, but her family could not afford to send her to college.

A speech she gave at a New Haven community center impressed Clarence Blakeslee, a local businessman and philanthropist, who offered to pay for her education. She attended Fisk University in Nashville for a year, then transferred to New York University, graduating in 1943 with a degree in economics. She entered Columbia Law School, becoming its second Black woman graduate in 1946. On 18 August 1946 she married Joel Wilson Motley Jr.; their son, Joel Wilson Motley III, was born in 1952.

Life and Work

While still a law student, Motley went to work in 1945 as a clerk for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), and she joined its legal staff after graduating. For nearly twenty years she was often the only woman on the LDF legal team. She worked on housing-discrimination and teacher-salary cases, including trials in Mississippi, and helped draft the 1950 complaint and later the briefs in the litigation that became Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

After Brown, Motley became the LDF’s leading trial lawyer in the long fight to make the decision real. She represented Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes, whose suit opened the University of Georgia in January 1961, and litigated desegregation cases involving public universities in Alabama, Florida, and South Carolina as well as public schools, parks, and lunch counters. Her best-known case was on behalf of James Meredith, an Air Force veteran refused admission to the University of Mississippi. After more than a year of litigation the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered his admission in 1962, and Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court set aside the stays that a dissenting Fifth Circuit judge had repeatedly entered to block it. State officials defied the order, and Meredith enrolled on 1 October 1962 after a night of rioting on the Oxford campus that left two people dead.

Beginning in 1961, Motley argued ten cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won nine, the first Black woman to argue before the Court. Her first, Hamilton v. Alabama (1961), established that a defendant in a capital case is entitled to counsel at arraignment. Most of the others defended sit-in demonstrators convicted under trespass and breach-of-peace laws, among them Gober v. City of Birmingham and Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham (1963) and Bouie v. City of Columbia and Hamm v. City of Rock Hill (1964). She also defended Freedom Riders arrested in the South and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement’s other leaders.

In 1964 Motley won a special election to the New York State Senate, the first Black woman elected to that body. In February 1965 the Manhattan members of the New York City Council chose her to fill a vacancy as Manhattan borough president, making her the first woman to hold the office. She held both offices only briefly before her appointment to the bench.

On 26 January 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, delayed the nomination for months, but the Senate confirmed her on 30 August 1966. She served as chief judge of the district from 1982 to 1986 and took senior status in 1986, continuing to hear cases. Among her notable rulings was Ludtke v. Kuhn (1978), which held that Major League Baseball could not bar a woman sportswriter from the Yankees’ locker room while admitting her male colleagues. Earlier, in Blank v. Sullivan & Cromwell (1975), she had declined to recuse herself from a sex-discrimination suit against a Wall Street law firm, rejecting the argument that her own history made her unable to judge it fairly.

Legacy

Motley died of congestive heart failure in New York on 28 September 2005, two weeks after her eighty-fourth birthday, still a senior judge. She published an autobiography, Equal Justice Under Law, in 1998. Her honors included induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame (1993), the Presidential Citizens Medal (2001), and the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal (2003); in 2024 the U.S. Postal Service issued a Black Heritage stamp in her honor.

For many years Motley’s role in the legal civil rights movement was overshadowed by those of her male colleagues at the LDF. Recent scholarship, notably Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s biography Civil Rights Queen (2022), has restored her to the center of that history, as the lawyer who carried Brown into the trial courts of the Deep South and as a pioneer for Black women in American law and politics.

For Educators

A court victory becomes real only when someone enforces it: Motley turned Brown v. Board of Education from a ruling into open doors, one case at a time. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 14 September 1921 Born in New Haven, Connecticut, to parents from Nevis.
  2. 1945 Begins work as a law clerk for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
  3. 1946 Graduates from Columbia Law School and joins the LDF legal staff.
  4. January 1961 University of Georgia admits her clients Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes.
  5. 1961 Becomes the first Black woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.
  6. 1 October 1962 James Meredith enrolls at the University of Mississippi after her successful litigation.
  7. 1964 Elected to the New York State Senate, its first Black woman member.
  8. February 1965 Becomes Manhattan borough president, the first woman in the office.
  9. 30 August 1966 Confirmed as U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York.
  10. 28 September 2005 Dies in New York while serving as a senior federal judge.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. Federal Judicial Center, “Motley, Constance Baker,” Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges. Link
  2. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, “Constance Baker Motley: Judiciary’s Unsung Rights Hero,” 20 February 2020. Link
  3. Supreme Court Historical Society, “Constance Baker Motley.” Link
  4. NYC Department of Records and Information Services, “A Woman of Firsts: Constance Baker Motley,” 8 March 2024. Link
  5. Constance Baker Motley, Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
  6. Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality (New York: Pantheon, 2022).

Related on Black-History.com

Cite this page
MLA
“Constance Baker Motley.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/people/constance-baker-motley/.
APA
Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Constance Baker Motley. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/constance-baker-motley/
Chicago
Black-History.com Editors. “Constance Baker Motley.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/constance-baker-motley/.
Editorial Note

By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

← All people  ·  People A-Z →