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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue with our MLK Day Civil Rights conversations featuring highlights from our monthly full bio series where we explore a big chunky biography over the course of a week. Before the break, we began discussing the book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by Tomiko Brown-Nagin. Constitutional Law professor at Harvard, and Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Let's get back to it.

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Alison Stewart: The James Meredith case is the one I think most of us learn about in school. He became the first Black student to enter the University of Mississippi. You write in your book, Thurgood Marshall said, "That man has got to be crazy," referring to Meredith wanting to matriculate to Ole Miss, which you describe in your book as "a safe educational space for white sons of the South." Meredith was older than the average college student, a veteran. Why did he want to attend Ole Miss?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: James Meredith really loved the state of Mississippi. Being a veteran, like other Black veterans, he returned fighting. That is, he had seen a relative racial equality in the service. He had more room to navigate, and he thought that he deserved, by virtue of he and his family being taxpayers in the Magnolia State and having a heritage there to attend this state-supported flagship university, and so he set out to do it.

It's also the case that he had what was thought of as a messianic zeal about this mission to attend Ole Miss. Yet, because the state was so violent it was commonly thought as the most racially repressive state of many racially repressive states of the South, Thurgood Marshall thought he was crazy to attempt to undermine Jim Crow at Ole Miss. Yet that is what he did.

Alison Stewart: The suit was filed against Ole Miss on May 31st, 1961. What was Constance Baker Motley's strategy here?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Motley took the case, and I should mention that Marshall thought that, of course she had the courtroom skills to litigate the case. He also thought that her gender might be an advantage. Was such a racially hostile state to Black men, but he thought that it would be less likely for those in the state to harm a Black woman. Which in some ways was fanciful given that racial violence was visited on Black women too. Nevertheless, Motley took the case. It was just a long, extended, convoluted effort to insist that Mississippi comply with the law by virtue of other cases that had proceeded it.

Really by virtue of Brown v Board of Education, which laid the groundwork for desegregation throughout education and indeed in society. She outlasted them. It took so many hearings, so many trips from New York to Mississippi to achieve what she eventually did, which was Meredith's admission to the university. It was just a long, long battle that required a great deal of resilience, including, because, Alison, at some point, James Meredith himself just wanted to give up.

Alison Stewart: Part of her job was to keep Meredith sane and intact. It was harder than one might think. What started to happen to his resolve and how did Baker Motley keep him locked in?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: He started to just break down from all of the harassment and all of the danger that surrounded him, as well as Motley and Medgar Evers who helped her, supported her effort in Mississippi. He saw that his friends had gone on with their lives while he and his family were sacrificing to try to end segregation at Mississippi and he just wanted to give up. He had written a letter saying, it was so much resolved to challenge segregation at Ole Miss.

Then he ended up writing another letter saying, I am human after all. I can't take this anymore. I need to end this. I need to go on with my life. Motley who had poured herself into the case was disappointed, and she, as I write, morphed from lawyer to therapist to try to get Meredith to carry on. She brought him to her New York City apartment, so removed him from this horrible environment. In New York City, he could taste freedom.

She just told him, they had gone too far. Too many resources had been invested in the case by the Inc Fund and even by the federal courts. He had to go on, and he did. I also want to say one of the strategies there was to continually get him out of the environment that was causing him so much pain including by he wanted to relax, and that was-- He wanted to dance. He wanted to be with his friends. Those were important to giving him the strength to carry on.

Alison Stewart: The case really highlighted how Baker Motley and civil rights lawyers were up against a whole system. Judges, elected officials, law enforcement many time in cahoots. What or who was the most egregious of all the characters in the Meredith case?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: That's a hard question.

Alison Stewart: So many choices, unfortunately.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: The governor of the state of Mississippi, he was a racial demagogue. He would go on TV and just insist that they were not going to back down in the face of the civil rights suit. Federal judges, including near the end of the case when it was clear that the state had lost the case, just wouldn't comply with the orders of the court. There was one particular judge who tried to stall there at the very end, and Motley had to go to the US Supreme Court and finally get an order demanding Meredith's matriculation to Ole Miss. Yet even that was not the end, because there was violent pushback to his presence on campus.

There was rioting and two people were killed in the process of trying to get Meredith onto campus to get him to matriculate at Ole Miss. It was just a horrible, horrible way to triumph in the case. Even after he was on campus, Alison, he suffered. He was subjected to racial taunts from other students. It was miserable. For his own safety, he lived apart from the other students. He took his meals apart from other students and yet he ended up graduating.

Alison Stewart: There is some really great old-school news, real footage of those moments describing the violence on campus. Let's take a listen.

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News Anchor: James H Meredith is formerly enrolled at the University of Mississippi, ending one chapter in the federal government's efforts to desegregate the university. The town of Oxford is an armed camp following riots that accompanied the registration of the first Negro in the university's 118-year history. Much of this film record was destroyed when our cameraman, Gordon Yoder was attacked, but he did salvage pictures of Governor Ross Barnett at the scene.

The governor fought the court order long and bitterly before modifying his staff, saying Mississippi was overpowered by the federal government. Nearly 6,000 troops patrol Oxford to maintain order, and arrests mount to more than 200 as smaller disturbances erupt the next day. Former Major General Edwin Walker who came here from his home in Texas is put under arrest and held in high bail on charges of inciting insurrection. He was flown to a federal prison hospital, as relative calm settle on the town in the greatest crisis the South has faced since the Civil War.

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Alison Stewart: Did Constance Baker Motley ever fear for her own safety or her family's?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Absolutely. She feared for her safety, and rightly so. Perhaps the most poignant way to explain her fear is to recite-- I recall how she and Medgar Evers, who's the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, and who is charged with, for instance, getting her from the airport and driving her to the federal courthouse, they would be trailed by the state police. Evers would say things to her when they were driving along the highway, like, "Don't look back, we're being followed. Put that legal pad inside the New York Times." Because you didn't want to be stopped, and you didn't want the law enforcement to see the proof that Motley was fighting the system.

She would just be scared to death. She was scared when she stayed with Evers at his home where she didn't feel safe. She noted to Evers that there were hedges that were close to the house. There were big hedges, and she said, "Someone could hide behind those hedges and do you harm. Do us harm if they wanted to." That is exactly what happened. About a month after Motley ended her time in Mississippi litigating the Ole Miss case, Medgar Evers was assassinated by a man who hid behind one of those hedges and killed him as he got out of his car.

She was devastated. Motley was devastated by that. He was her friend as well as her supporter. She had spent time with his family. They would provide home-cooked meals for her. It was just devastating. An example of the real danger that she faced litigating on behalf of African Americans to try to make the principles in the United States Constitution a reality in this country.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin. We are speaking about her book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. It's our choice for full bio this month. Now I cringe when someone asks, how did a woman do it all? How do you balance life and career, it's such a gross question to ask women these days. When you think about it in Constant Baker Motley's time, it's a relevant question. It was not normal. The norm that a mother and a wife would travel thousands of miles, spends weeks away from her husband and her child. She often said she had a very special spouse. What toll did it take on her to be away from her family like that?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: It was awful for her. She had missed her husband and she missed her child. Earlier I was talking about the University of Georgia case, I do include in the book, reference to how every day at the end of the hearing she would go to the court office and ask to use the telephone. She would call back to her husband and son in New York City just to hear their voices. She also, Alison, she traveled more than she otherwise would've just to get some time with them during her trial, flying back to New York and then returning to wherever she was litigating. It was really hard.

Not only because she missed her family, because it was transgressive for her to be a wife and mother and to play this role in the legal profession. I note that she became pregnant and then had her son, Joel III. Went on maternity leave and returned to the office during the same time as the Inc Fund was litigating Brown v Board of Education. Imagine having to do that. The lawyers worked terribly long hours when they were expected to be away from their families and be fully devoted to the cause, and yet she had had an infant and she had to take care of him. How did she do it all? Well, because she had a supportive husband who co-parented.

She had siblings who would pitch in. She hired help and was vocal that women who could afford it could, should hire help, household support for babysitting and cooking, and cleaning. Yet one of the things that frankly is sad and telling is that towards the end of her life, when this woman who had accomplished so much in so many areas of the legal profession and in politics asked what was her greatest achievement, she said that it was her son Joel III, who turned out well, even though his mommy was often not at home. She felt that pull and that push that a lot of parents still feel as they're trying to juggle home life and work life. Of course mothers experience this pull profoundly so.

Alison Stewart: That was part of my conversation with historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin about the subject of her book, which is called Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley, and the Struggle for Equality. We'll hear more of that conversation after a really quick break. This is All Of It.

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You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Welcome back to our MLK Day Show. Before the break, we were hearing from historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin about the subject of her book which is called Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley, and the Struggle for Equality. Let's get back into it.

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Let's talk about politics. How did Constance Baker Motley make the shift from civil rights lawyer to being a political figure?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: She made the shift because people in the Democratic party in New York could see that she would be a great asset. After all, she had name recognition which is invaluable in politics. She was so obviously smart and she was striking, she was attractive. The politicians invited her to run for office. One of the figures who tried to get her into politics and successfully so wanted her to be the first Black mayor of New York City. Saw in her a great opportunity at a time when African Americans were clamoring for recognition and representation, and empowerment in politics. Motley became a standard bearer in that effort.

Alison Stewart: There was a split in the support for her becoming a New York State senator. Who was for her and who was not for her entry into New York State politics?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: This is an important story to tell. Both in her run for the Senate and also when she ran for Manhattan Borough president, she had support with the Black king's maker of the day, or queen maker in this instance, and among some white politicians, but people like Adam Clayton Powell Jr, and Malcolm X, and others thought that she should stay in her lane. That she had no business running for office. That she was not authentic. Whatever one conjured when one thought of an authentic Black person, Constance Baker Motley was not it. They were pretty hostile to her.

Alison Stewart: She becomes the first Black woman to become a New York State senator. What were her legislative priorities?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: She wanted to ensure that she supported social programs that would aid low-income New Yorkers, Black New Yorkers. She opposed legislation that would give police officers the right to enter-- these were no-knock bills. That would give the police officers a right to, on thin evidence, enter an apartment. It's an issue that is still resonant today. She was against police abuses and harassment, and really in the realm of politics, continue to pursue a quality for African Americans and continue to push access to programs that would better the lives of African Americans.

She had benefited herself from the new deal and worked for a new deal agency when she was a teenager. Lyndon Johnson and his great society extended the new deal in many ways, and she was all for it. When she became Manhattan Borough president, had a big hand in the city budget, and she used her power, her influence to help to revitalize Harlem, and as I mentioned earlier, to ensure that social programs had enough money to help people who desperately needed help in New York City.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin. We are talking about her book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, our choice for full bio this month. It is Women's History Month after all. You make the note that during the course of her political career, many powerful white men were ready to support her. Did that make her suspect to Black activists?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: To an extent, it did, to those who were the most radical. She had the backing of the establishment, and to have the backing of the Democratic establishment was suspect in the minds of many of those people. Of course, this is during the dawn of the Black power movement, when a lot of African Americans sought to represent themselves. They didn't want anyone who was handpicked by white people, including even white liberal Democrats.

They wanted to choose their own representatives. It was for that reason that Motley was-- they met Motley with some suspicion. Also, because Motley represented integration and they wanted something a little different. They had moved beyond integration to the concept of Black power, Black empowerment, Black self-determination. She did meet a lot of skepticism during that time--

Alison Stewart: She also was not that engaged with the women's movement or even the word "feminist". What troubled her about the language around feminism at the moment?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: First of all, she was in politics at the time that she said, "I am not a feminist." That's important because, of course, as a politician she needs to appeal to as broad an audience and to many constituencies as broad as possible, and to many constituencies. It would not have done her any good in her estimation to go out of her way to embrace feminism, a term that was not going to win her any favors among a lot of people, and so she didn't. Yet, as I write in my book, she didn't spend her time articulating feminism but she certainly did it.

Insofar as she was a woman elected official, she understood that she was symbolically important for that reason. If not a feminist herself, she surrounded herself with women who were feminists, Shirley Chisholm and Dorothy Kenyon, and others who were more vocal about their support of so-called women's issues. What I'm saying is that a part of what she was doing was engaging in a dance that one has to be successful as a politician. I think a part of it too was that she had spent her life struggling for Black equality, and it made sense to her at a time when African Americans hardly had arrived to continue promoting that struggle. That's how I see her shyness about calling herself a feminist.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It for this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. All Of It is produced by Andrea Duncan Mao, Kate Hines, Jordan Loft, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L Malik Anderson, and Luke Green. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. Our engineers are Juliana Fonda and Jason Isaac. Luscious Jackson does our music. If you miss any of our segments, you can always catch up by listening to our podcast available on your podcast platform of choice.

If you like what you hear, please leave us a great rating. It helps people find the show. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. Take the rest of the day to meditate on that long arc of the moral universe and how Dr. King and so many others have worked to bend it towards justice. I'll meet you back here next time.

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