[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: Welcome back to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm so grateful to be spending part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day with you. Last hour, we spent some time discussing the critically acclaimed biography, King: A Life, by Jonathan Eig. It was long-listed for the 2023 National Book Award. If you'd like to hear the full 90-ish-minute interview, you can check out our website to listen to those conversations if you missed them. You can go to wnyc.org/allofit.

This hour, we continue the theme of civil rights with the author of the book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and constitutional law professor at Harvard. Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman to work on a case before the Supreme Court.

In 1964, she became the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate. In 1965, she became the first woman and Black person to serve as Manhattan borough president. In 1968, President Johnson named her to the federal bench for the Southern District of New York, making her the first Black woman federal judge. During her career, she found herself representing a young civil rights leader named Martin Luther King.

When now Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accepted her nomination to the highest court in the land, she invoked Baker Motley's name. Let's hear some highlights from my conversation about Baker Motley's legal career. I began by asking Brown-Nagin to explain the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund through which Baker Motley took on some of the most important cases of the civil rights movement.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, or the Inc. Fund as it also was called, was the legal arm of the NAACP, the nation's oldest civil rights organization that had, as its mission, improving the lives of Black Americans. The Inc. Fund sought to improve Black lives through the legal process by filing cases that was meant to undermine Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation and racial oppression as it was manifested throughout society, and the educational system, and employment in the political system, and anywhere that one might think of. All of those institutions were infected with racial bias. The Inc. Fund was the most vital organization fighting for racial and social change through the law.

Alison Stewart: What was Thurgood Marshall's role at the time at the Legal Defense Fund and NAACP when he first met Constance Baker? What was his position?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Thurgood Marshall was the head of the Inc. Fund and its standard bearer. He would go on to argue Brown v. Board of Education along with some other colleagues and became known as Mr. Civil Rights. He was a terrifically important figure in the history of American law and in African-American history. His meeting with Constance Baker Motley changed her life. She says many times if it hadn't been for Thurgood Marshall, no one ever would've heard of Constance Baker Motley. He was a vitally important figure in racial change in this country.

Alison Stewart: She would always cite him as one of the few men who would hire women, but the legend about Thurgood Marshall is he liked a couple of drops to drink. He also likes [laughs] to admire women and he asked her to do one of those things that men did at the time. He assessed her physically. We'll put it that way. What did he see in her mind that he knew she was special?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Well, she was so intelligent. It was obvious when one heard her speak. She was ambitious. After all, it was transgressive for her to be in law school and to find her way to the offices of the Inc. Fund and to want to work in the struggle for equality. He saw what everyone saw, which was this extraordinarily talented young woman, ambitious, committed, and she was a great choice to bring along to the team of lawyers who were, as Jack Greenberg one of them called, a dedicated band struggling for civil rights.

Alison Stewart: Her first courtroom experience took place in Mississippi to take on a lawsuit involving equal pay for Black teachers. The plaintiff was Gladys Noel Bates. Who was Gladys and what did she want?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Gladys was a schoolteacher in the Jackson system, a well-educated one. She had family connections to the NAACP. She wanted to be paid according to her worth. She wanted to be paid according to the same criteria as white teachers, and she was not. She signed onto this case brought by the NAACP lawyers challenging the race-based pay differentials used not only by the Jackson school system but throughout the South. That is the case that Motley litigated along with her colleague Bob Carter in Jackson, Mississippi.

Alison Stewart: This is a sentence I underlined three times in your book, Civil Rights Queen. You write that Motley and Robert Carter were the first Black lawyers to appear in a Mississippi courtroom since Reconstruction. It's an amazing sentence. [laughs] You describe their reception and all the indignities. This is an odd question, I know, but which one of these indignities did you think was most interesting?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Well, it actually is the contrast between Motley and Carter and how they carried themselves despite the racial hostility and the posture of Jess Brown. Jess Brown is a Black Mississippi lawyer who does not normally appear in the courtroom. He is relegated to other sorts of matters. Yet, the NAACP lawyers, when they go to these states, they have to have local counsel. Jess Brown sits at the council table with them, but he sits on the far side of it.

He does something that is just extraordinary every time I think about it, which is instead of walking upright, he bends himself at the waist in order to display his subservience before the crowd of white lawyers and the white judge. He knows his place. That reality just captures the moment, the historical moment, and the extraordinary racial oppression in this region of the country, and what Motley was up against, not only as an African American but as a woman.

Another scene I'll discuss, Alison, is how these lawyers couldn't even purchase food. They couldn't eat in restaurants, white-owned restaurants, or sleep in white-owned hotels. There's this scene where if they're not going to get a full lunch, they wanted to get some fruit from a fruit stand, and they go in and the proprietor is disrespectful to Bob Carter. Bob Carter had served in the US Army. He was just a wonderful and proud man. I knew him personally. I clerked for him on the US District Court in New York.

The person who was supposed to be waiting on him is disrespectful to him. Motley, who's standing beside him, can feel his body tense up. She wants to say something. She wants to speak out in the face of this disrespect. He says to her, he makes a gesture as if to say to her, "No, don't speak. It's not worth it. We are here to do a job and we cannot be riled up by racism." That too just captures the reality of the situation. They are there fighting on behalf of these Black schoolteachers, but also, Alison, on their own behalf. They experience some of the same indignities as their own clients, which is just an extraordinary thing to ponder.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin. We're speaking about her book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. It's our choice for this month's full bio. Just want to take a little bit of a turn and talk about how Motley had her own issues around equity in the workplace with the Legal Defense Fund and the NAACP. What was the biggest obstacle or maybe who was the biggest obstacle to her getting the recognition and equal financial compensation?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Yes. Well, this is ironic indeed. The story I'll recount, which is after she leaves Jackson, Mississippi, where she's been fighting on behalf of these Black schoolteachers who sought equal pay. She marches into Thurgood Marshall's office and says to him, well, she's not being paid what she should and she doesn't have the title that she should at the Inc. Fund. She requests. She demands equity for herself.

Eventually, Marshall does and the NAACP, Roy Wilkins is the head of the organization at this time. Her salary is increased and her title is changed. That story just goes to show how even at this organization, there were blind spots because of gender and race and the combination of gender and race. She's fighting a battle for equal pay even in the civil rights organization. It's a remarkable story.

Alison Stewart: Brown v. Board of Education. Obviously, we all learned about it in school. If you think about, "Okay, who are the lawyers in Brown v. Board of Education?" Thurgood Marshall and James Nesbit and maybe George E.C. Hayes will come to mind or Spottswood Robinson, I think, yes. You can name off several men, but Constance Baker Motley was integral to Brown v. Board of Education. Why don't people know her name in connection with this pivotal case?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: I would say for two reasons. First of all, unlike those men, she didn't actually argue the case in the Supreme Court. She played a supportive role, a vitally important role helping-- Well, she wrote the original complaint in the Brown cases, which is the legal document that sets out the cause of action. Vitally important. She helped do her search for the briefs and did a lot of grunt work like proofing the briefs. She didn't have the star role at the Supreme Court.

Second, it's because of gender in our society. Those who are deemed worthy of historical remembrance, all too often, are men. That's true even in the scholarship on the civil rights movement where figures like Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., have become household names but not Constance Baker Motley. Only relatively recently are we learning about other significant women figures like Pauli Murray, Ella Baker. Rosa Parks is well-known, and yet the story that we tell about Rosa Parks is, in many ways, consistent with a traditional gender narrative even if it wasn't reality. It comes down to gender, I would say.

Alison Stewart: Motley faced hostility in Southern courtrooms because of her race and gender. Judges and officials often referred to Motley as "she" rather than use her surname. The first case we'll hear about involved two young women. One named Pollie Myers and the other, Autherine Lucy, who wanted to attend the University of Alabama. Motley misjudged something in the case as we'll hear, a mistake she would not repeat when she fought for Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter to attend the University of Georgia. She submitted an application to the University of Alabama that made no mention of race. Why did she do this?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Well, she wanted to continue her education and she wanted to do it and was inspired to do it in part because of her friend, Pollie Anne Myers, who also made an application to the University of Alabama. The story that I tell about this effort is that it ends up failing along two dimensions. First of all, Pollie Anne Myers ends up being dropped from the case. This is after the lawyers for the University of Alabama claimed that she has misrepresented herself.

This is related to their discovery that she had had a child before she was married and she had a different marital name and so they assassinate her character. Frankly, Motley and other civil rights lawyers working on the case don't protest too much because they believed in the politics of respectability where the idea that women needed to be virginal and virtuous was accepted. Pollie Anne Myers is dropped. Autherine Lucy continues in the case, but she too is turned away from the University of Alabama. There's a riot.

Motley and Thurgood Marshall make a claim about the university president conspiring with rioters. This ends up being too much. She can't prove it. The NAACP ends up having to apologize and the case ends. Autherine Lucy, she's pretty devastated by all of this. Just the attention, the violence, the backlash. It is an example. I write in the book about how these plaintiffs in these cases suffer so much and the cause of equality. Also, just the cases didn't always succeed. Even someone like Constance Baker Motley makes mistakes.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I'm so glad you brought that up because I was going to ask about the dark notes of the Autherine Lucy case. This idea that Pollie Myers would be dropped and that people wouldn't think that much of it, that the civil rights organizations at this time really wanted almost perfect clients. Was that a necessary evil at the time?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: The lawyers would say, "Yes, it was." These cases were hard. They were up against the law. They were up against often violent backlash against even victories in court. They needed the plaintiffs to be, as you say, nearly perfect. They were so excited to encounter Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Homes in the University of Georgia case. They were, what you might call, all-American, except for their race. They were perfect, great students, and involved in school, extracurriculars. Frankly, those kind of plaintiffs made the cases easier. Yes, a necessary evil in the context of white resistance to the struggle for Black equality.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to get to the Georgia case in just a moment. I want to wrap up with Autherine Lucy's case. The miscalculation that Motley made, the overreach that she made, the accusations she made, what happened there? Why do you think she made this particular error?

Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Well, I don't think that the idea was outlandish. It is that people at the university were conspiring with those who were engaged in violent backlash against her client because, at the time, it was the case that, for instance, White Citizens' Councils comprised of upstanding figures in the white community often were in cahoots with the more violent figures and people who weren't so upstanding.

It's not an outlandish claim to make. It's that she couldn't prove the claim. For that reason, it was overreach. These lawyers just couldn't afford to make mistakes like that and so this case concluded in defeat. There's a second case that has to be filed against the University of Alabama. That ultimately desegregates the university and that's in the '60s. It takes many years to recover and achieve the goal that Autherine Lucy sought so many years before.

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 quick break. This is All Of It.

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.