"Judge" Constance Baker Motley Takes Another Giant Step

    10 Columbus Circle 
&. New York, N.Y. 10019 

JUdson 6-8397 

NAACP 

Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
PRESS RELEASE 
President 

lon. Francis E. Rivers 

Lite Re pep aes FOR IMMEDIATE.RELEASE 
Saturday 
January %30, “1966 

"JUDGE" CONSTANCE BAKER MOTLEY 
TAKES ANOTHER GIANT STEP 

NEW YCRK---The New York headquarters of the NAACP Legal Defense 
and Educational Fund, Inc. burst into an uproar of excitement 
this week when word came that President Lyndon B, Johnson had 
named Constance Baker Motley to the Federal District Court 
bench. 

Mrs. Motley, nationally known for her amazing string of 
civil rights legal victories, served in the Fund's number two 
administrative post prior to her entry into public life. — 

Jack Greenberg, the Fund's director-counsel cee eae the 
news from Washington. 

As a federal judge, Mrs. Motley will have to take a) $5,000 
cut from the $35,000 a year she now makes as Manhattan Borough 
President. However, the judgeship is a lifetime positi 

A New Haven benefactor helped launch Mrs. Motley ae her 
career, but her colleagues at the NAACP Legal Defensevand 
Educational Fund Inc., where she championed the cause of civil 
rights for more than 20 years, know that Connie Motley wrote 
her own success story. 

Although always a top student in public schools in her 
native New Haven, Mrs. Motley's chances for attending college 
appeared dim. 

Her father, a chef, could not hope to finance her college 
education while supporting his other 11 children. 

But one night a wealthy New Haven contractor heard her 
"sound off" as she puts it, during a discussion of why Negroes 
were not more active. 

Impressed with the clarity and logic of her words, the 
contractor offered to finance her education. “It was like a 
fairy tale," Mrs. Motley later remarked. 

She attended Fisk University in Nashville, but after a year 
and a half transferred to New York University where she earned a 
degree in economics. 

From there she went to Columbia University Law School "because 
Abraham Lincoln believed law is difficult and I want to do 
something difficult," she said. She took her law degree in 1946, 
and has been doing difficult things ever since, 

While still at Columbia, she joined the Legal Defense Fund 
as a law clerk. After graduation, she married Joel Motley, and 
plunged full-time into the civil rights struggle as a Legal 
Defense Fund staff lawyer. 

Her boss at the Legal Defense Fund was Thurgood Marshall, who 
later became a federal circuit court of appeals judge, and is now 
U.S. Solicitor General. 

(more) 

Jesse DeVore, Jr., Director of Public Information—Night Number 212 Riverside 9-8487 Ss 



Be sudge Constance Baker Motley 
Takes Another Giant Step 

Pag eR BS 

= ’ Li 

Another Legal Defense Fund colleague was Edward Dud? 
a State Supreme Court justice, whom she was to succeed a 
President of the Borough of Manhattan. 

With vigor and determination, the lady lawyer carve: ua 
Teputation for herself as one of the nation's leading civil rights # 
attorneys. She rose to Associate Counsel, the number two post = 
"in the Legal Defense Fund behind Jack Greenberg, who pmrCeOer i 
Mr. Marshall as Director-Counsel. ; 

i: She went before the U.S. Supreme Court six times 
all six cases. A seventh Supreme Court case she won 
argument, 

But it was her masterful handling of the complex ™ 
action that led to the enrollment of James Meredith in 
sity of Mississippi that catapaulted her to national fai 

Of that feat, Burke Marshall, then head of the Ci 
Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, said, "We’ couldn't 
have asked for anyone better, she could work for ane y 

Mrs. Motley also led the legal teams that broke b the the 
barriers of segregation at the University of Alabama (despite 
Gov. George Wallace's abortive stand in the doorway), Universities 
of Georgia and Florida and Clemson College, South Carolina. 

On the lower education level, she led the Legal Defense Fund 
fights that ended school segregation in Atlanta and Savannah, 
Ga.; Pensacola, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Daytona Beach and Tampa, 
Fla.; Chattanooga and Memphis, Tenn.; Mobile, Huntsville and 
Birmingham, Ala.; Hillsboro, Ohio; New Rochelle, Hempstead and 
Amityville, N.Y. and Englewood, N.J. 

The list of Mrs. Notley! s courtroom victories encompasses 
nearly every area of racial strife--housing, transportation, public 
accomodations, sit-ins, mass demonstrations and criminal prosecu- 

tions. 

She has personally defended prosecutions of the Rev. Dr. 
Martin Luter King as well as scores of lesser known civil, rights 
activists. % 

After being assured that public service would not interfere 
with her Legal Defense Fund activities, Mrs. Motley entered the 
political arena in 1964, becoming the first Negro woman to serve 
in the New York State Senate. 

She resigned from the Legal Defense Fund when she was appoin- 
ted Manhattan's first lady president early in 1965, and won a 
landslide reelection to that post last November. 
ed 

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