CIVIL RIGHTS QUEEN

A stirring life of a civil rights crusader.

An outstanding student from a working-class background, Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005) entered law school at Columbia in 1944, a time when, she recalled, the campus “resembled a ghost town.” Brown-Nagin—a constitutional law professor, dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Bancroft Prize–winning author—ably shows how Motley emerged as not just one of the first Black women to practice law, but a key assistant to Thurgood Marshall. Early on, her work led a newspaper reporter to call her “the Civil Rights Queen,” and he had a point. Motley was a critically important member of the team that successfully litigated Brown v. Board of Education, to the delight of one Southern judge who “could not suppress his laughter” at the lies of school officials. In the second act of her life in public service, Motley became the first woman to be elected the borough president of Manhattan and the first Black woman to be elected to the New York Senate. Finally, she became a federal judge who had a gift, as the author beautifully and convincingly demonstrates, for interpreting precedents in novel ways. For example, in deciding a case in which women reporters had been banned from the New York Yankees locker room, she weighed the presumed privacy rights of ballplayers through the lens of Roe v. Wade, with its promise of anonymity, but “rejected it as a legitimate reason for banning female journalists from the locker room entirely,” citing a previous case won by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In some cases, Motley was so far ahead of the societal curve that she courted controversy, as when she ruled that gay Catholics could protest in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The following year, notes Brown-Nagin, the Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of consensual gay sex, but Motley anticipated the sea change that would soon follow.

An excellent exploration of the life of an admirable pioneer who deserves to be far better known.