UMLawyer

The Passing of a Great Lady

Judge Constance Baker Motley died Sept. 28 at New York University Downtown Hospital in Manhattan. She was 84.

Judge Motley, who was known in our part of the country as the attorney for James Meredith when he was seeking admission to The University of Mississippi, was a civil rights pioneer who was intimately involved with nearly every important civil rights case for two decades. She then became the first black woman to serve on the federal bench when President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated her for a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1966. She became chief judge for the Southern District in 1982 and took senior status in 1986.

Judge Motley was born in New Haven, Conn., Sept. 14, 1921, to parents who came from the small Caribbean island of Nevis around the turn of the century. She started undergraduate school at Fisk University in Nashville, where she first encountered a segregated society. It was not, however, her first experience with racial discrimination. She recalled being turned away from a public beach in the North at age 15 because she was black. She later transferred to NYU, where she graduated in 1943. She entered Columbia Law School that same year and began part-time work as a volunteer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. After she received her law degree in 1946, she began working full time for the organization along with some of the great civil rights advocates of the time, including Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg and Robert Carter.

In her long and distinguished career with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Judge Motley worked on housing discrimination cases, cases that ended segregation in restaurants in Memphis and cases that led to blacks’ being admitted to the universities of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, and Clemson University. She helped write briefs in the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education case and argued 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. She won nine of them.

Judge Motley visited the UM law school twice during my tenure as dean. The first time was in fall 1998, when she delivered the Matthews Lecture. The second was in fall 2002, during the ceremony commemorating 40 years of “Open Doors” at Ole Miss. She is perhaps best-known for her role as James Meredith’s attorney in the historic case that led to the integration of Ole Miss and higher education in Mississippi. When she was here for the university’s 2002 celebration, she told me that on the eve of Meredith’s enrollment, he wanted to back out because he was weary of the process that had taken him to that point. She said she and others talked him into staying the course, telling him that he had come too far to back out. They prevailed, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Judge Motley was a tall, dignified, stately woman. She had a commanding presence and exuded an air of quiet confidence. She was one of the lions of our time. She was a great lawyer, a great judge and a great lady. And she was a friend. She will be missed. I could not let her passing go unnoticed and unobserved, especially at this institution with which she was so intimately involved, not only in the 1960s but for all time. She was, and remains, one of my heroes.

—Reflection by Samuel M. Davis