Culture Watch: Jo Freeman’s Review of Constance Baker Motley, One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice Under Law

Review by Jo Freeman

Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law

By Gary L. Ford, Jr.
Published by University of Alabama Press, 2017,  viii, 164 pp.

Photo, right: NAACP Attorneys Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall;  Jack Greenberg, left, replaced Marshall as chief counsel of the NAACP Inc. Fund when Marshall became a federal appeals court judge in 1961.  (Credit: NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Educational Fund, Inc.)

Constance Baker Motley was the first black woman to be appointed as a federal judge.  But it was what she did before becoming a judge that warrants this biography.  For twenty years she was on the front line of the legal assault on segregation, arguing dozens of cases as the only female attorney on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (aka Inc. Fund)

Born in Connecticut in 1921, Connie Baker was the ninth of 12 children of West Indian immigrants.  A top student, she decided at an early age that she wanted to be a lawyer, but couldn’t find the money for college, let alone law school.  That problem was solved when she impressed the first of two important male mentors, a white philanthropist who paid her way through private college and Columbia Law School.

Her second mentor was Thurgood Marshall, who hired her as a law clerk while she was still a student.  After law school he put her on the Inc. Fund staff, where she stayed for twenty years.

The other important man in her life was her husband, Joel Motley Jr. whom she met in law school and married soon after graduation.  He was way ahead of his time in being a supportive husband and active father married to a woman in an important job who traveled a great deal.

This was most fortunate, because her boss, Thurgood Marshall, frequently sent her South to argue cases in the federal district courts.  He thought women were less likely to be physically attacked than the men.  In the South CBM was constantly surrounded by bodyguards, and still had some scary experiences.  She also had to live and work within its segregated society while fighting it in court. 

In those days the South’s segregated institutions provided few places for traveling blacks to sleep at night so they often stayed in private homes.  For this, it was handy to have a local member of the NAACP.  The few black attorneys in the Southern states often were CBM’s hosts, as well as co-counsel in order to meet the requirement that a member of a state’s bar be on the case.  Either the author or the Inc. Fund didn’t seem to know about The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide for black travelers to places where they could eat, sleep and shop.