Pioneering black woman lawyer at the forefront of the civil rights struggle in America
Godfrey Hodgson
Saturday October 1, 2005
The Guardian
Constance Baker Motley, who has died aged 84, was the first African-American woman to become a US federal judge and also the first black woman to be elected to the New York state senate. Among many other groundbreaking achievements, she was also the first woman - of any race - to become president of one of the five boroughs that make up New York city, in her case Manhattan.
Her most important achievements, however, came arguably when she was a key member of the team that won the historic civil rights case Brown v School Board of Topeka, Kansas et al in 1954. This was the case in which the US supreme court ruled that there was no such thing as "separate but equal" education, and thus declared segregated schooling to be unconstitutional.
It was Motley who drafted the original complaint, which was successfully argued by Thurgood Marshall, later the first black justice on the supreme court.
In her own right, as counsel for the long-established civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she won nine of the 10 civil rights cases she litigated before the supreme court.
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