Constance Baker Motley

NEW YORK (AP) - When she was 15, Constance Baker Motley was turned away from a public beach because she was black. It was only then - even though her mother was active in the NAACP - that the teenager really became interested in civil rights.

She went to law school and found herself fighting racism in landmark segregation cases including Brown v. Board of Education, the Central High School case in Arkansas and the case that let James Meredith enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Motley also broke barriers herself: She was the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, as well the first one elected to the New York state Senate.

Motley, who would have celebrated her 40th anniversary on the bench next year, died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at NYU Downtown Hospital, said her son, Joel Motley III. She was 84.

"She is a person of a kind and stature the likes of which they're not making anymore," said Chief Judge Michael Mukasey in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where Motley served.

From 1961 to 1964, Motley won nine of 10 civil rights cases she argued before the Supreme Court.

"Judge Motley had the strength of a self-made star," federal Judge Kimba Wood said. "As she grew, she was unfailingly optimistic and positive - she never let herself be diverted from her goal of achieving civil rights, even though, as she developed as a lawyer, she faced almost constant condescension from our profession due to her being an African-American woman."

Motley, who spent two decades with the NCAAP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, started out there in 1945 as a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, then its chief counsel and later a Supreme Court justice. In 1950, she prepared the draft complaint for what would become Brown v. Board of Education.

In her autobiography, "Equal Justice Under Law," Motley said defeat never entered her mind. "We all believed that our time had come and that we had to go forward."

The Supreme Court ruled in her and her colleagues' favor in 1954 in a decision credited with toppling public school segregation in America while touching off resistance across the country and leading to some of the racial clashes of the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, she personally argued the Meredith case as well as the suit that resulted in the enrollment of two black students at the University of Georgia.

"Mrs. Motley's style could be deceptive, often allowing a witness to get away with one lie after another without challenging him," one of the students, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, wrote in her 1992 book, "In My Place." But she would "suddenly threw a curve ball with so much skill and power that she would knock them off their chair."

Motley also argued the 1957 case in Little Rock, Ark., that led President Eisenhower to call in federal troops to protect nine black students at Central High.

Also in the early 1960s, she successfully argued for 1,000 school children to be reinstated in Birmingham, Ala., after the local school board expelled them for demonstrating. She represented "Freedom Riders" who rode buses to test the Supreme Court's 1960 ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation. During this time, she represented King as well, defending his right to march in Birmingham and Albany, Ga.

Motley and the Legal Defense and Education Fund, committed to a careful strategy of dismantling segregation through the courts, were amazed by the emergence of more militant tactics such as lunch-counter sit-ins, but she came to believe that litigation was not the only road to equality.

Recalling a 1963 visit to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in jail, she remarked, "It was then I realized that we did indeed have a new civil rights leader - a man willing to die for our freedom."

Motley was born in New Haven, Conn., the ninth of 12 children. Her mother, Rachel Baker, was a founder of the New Haven chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Her father, Willoughby Alva Baker, worked as a chef for student organizations at Yale University.

It was the beach incident that solidified the course her life would take.

Though her parents could not afford to send her to college, a local philanthropist, Clarence W. Blakeslee, offered to pay for her education after hearing her speak at a community meeting.

Motley earned a degree in economics in 1943 from New York University, and three years later, got her law degree from Columbia Law School.

In the late 1950s, Motley took an interest in politics and by 1964 had left the NAACP to become the first black woman to serve in the New York Senate.

In 1965, she became the first woman president of the borough of Manhattan, where she worked to promote integration in public schools.

The following year, President Johnson nominated her to the federal bench in Manhattan. She was confirmed nine months later, though her appointment was opposed by conservative federal judges and Southern politicians.

Over the next four decades, Motley handled a number of civil rights cases, including her decision in 1978 allowing a female reporter to be admitted to the New York Yankees' locker room.

Motley is survived by her husband and son, three sisters and brother.


Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press