This For the Record blog post expands on a brief article in the February 2024 edition of the Municipal Library’s newsletter. New York City can count many groundbreaking women among its residents and leaders. Few, though, have been as inspiring as Constance Baker Motley who should be celebrated more widely, particularly in her adopted home of New York City. Yet there is only one public space honoring her—a recreation center on East 54th Street that the Parks Department renamed for her in 2021.   

The second Black woman to graduate from Columbia University Law School, Motley was one of the groundbreaking civil rights lawyers who fought segregation and Jim Crow throughout the nation. She was the first Black woman to serve in the New York State Senate, and the first woman to serve as a New York City borough president. That should be enough. But beyond those achievements, Motley was the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge, a position she held for 39 years.  

The Municipal Library biographical collection includes news clips, mostly from long-shuttered newspapers, documenting her career, as well as a Manhattan Borough President 1965 Annual Report. The Office of the Mayor collection in the Municipal Archives includes correspondence between Motley and the Mayor’s Office.  

Born in New Haven to immigrant parents from Nevis, Baker Motley aspired to attend college but lacked resources. While working as a housecleaner she volunteered with local organizations advocating for civil rights. Partly, she was inspired after being denied entry to a Connecticut public beach due to her color. In a fluke, a wealthy white contractor was in the audience when she was making a speech. He offered to fund her college education. And she was off! 

Initially attending Fisk University, she transferred to New York University to complete her undergraduate degree and then Columbia University’s Law School. While a student, she volunteered with the emerging Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the NAACP LDF, and was among the organization’s first employees. Working alongside Thurgood Marshall throughout the South, Baker Motley achieved major civil rights victories over a two-decade career. 

The first Black woman to appear before the United States Supreme Court, she argued ten cases, winning nine of them. One notable example is successfully representing James Meredith in the fight to desegregate the University of Mississippi.  

In a 1964 special election to fill a vacancy, she became the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate where she served for one year.

In February 1965, the existing Borough President of Manhattan resigned to become a State Supreme Court Justice. This triggered a process to fill the vacancy. Unlike the present, the vacancy was not filled via a special election. Instead, the City Council delegation for the borough—numbering 8 men—convened behind closed doors and determined the successor. In this instance, a prominent political leader, J. Raymond Jones, opposed the candidacy of the likely successor and advanced Motley. After meeting for two hours, the Council members emerged from their conference to declare they had elected Motley. With a salary of $35,000, Motley became both the Borough President and the highest paid female elected official in the country, according to the New York Herald Tribune.  

As Borough President, Motley championed the work of community boards and urged policymakers to tackle disparities, as she wrote in the transmittal letter for the 1965 Annual Report: “...our government must mount unceasing attacks on problems, old and new, so that, for example, we no longer perpetuate the misery of slum life which scars the urban scene just beyond our enclaves of culture and skyscraper symbols of material wealth. Superior educational facilities, jobs for all, and an improved business climate, are other problems of major import which must be met resolutely and solved satisfactorily.” 

Manhattan had established a community board structure in 1950 and Motley worked closely with these community leaders to advance projects and to develop plans that would end the “tale of two cities.” This included hosting two conferences for board members and the public to focus on revitalizing Harlem, from river-to-river. She recognized the need for board staffing and noted that “widespread and responsible citizen participation is not the natural state of affairs in local government, it must be nurtured.”   

Drawing on the Harlem community boards and other leaders, she organized two conferences that focused on revitalizing Harlem, from river-to-river between 110th and 155th Streets. The first conference led to agreement on a seven-point program to revitalize Harlem. Step one was securing funding in the capital budget. Step two was getting support from the two candidates for Mayor. Step three was getting federal funding.

Motley requested funding to develop a master plan for the project. The City Planning Commission did not include the request in their proposed budget and suggested that the request be taken up by the next mayoral administration. At a hearing on the budget, Motley testified, “I regard your observation as being both a frivolous and pedantic method of disposing of a problem which simply can not and must not be shoved under the rug of additional review or early consideration. I believe that the overwhelming majority of the population of our city realizes the frightful dimensions of the social economic and human problems we nurture in the slum ghetto.”

The project did receive capital funding when the new mayor, John V. Lindsay included $700,000 in the budget to advance community planning.

The second conference in January, 1966 was attended by both United States Senators, Jacob Javits and Robert Kennedy as well as Mayor Lindsay. The proceedings of this event were taped by WNYC, the municipal radio station and can be heard here.

One notable action incorporated into development plans was a series of community generated amendments to the Morningside Heights General Neighborhood Renewal Plan. Due to Motley’s insistence, and the deference given to Borough Presidents in certain actions, the Board of Estimate incorporated several amendments to the plan. These dealt with “insuring the continuation of the mixed racial and economic character of the neighborhood, maintaining the present width of Eighth Avenue, adequate relocation housing sources on the West Side, priority consideration for rehabilitation of existing housing as opposed to demolition and new construction.” Further, the adopted plan limited expansion in the neighborhood to those in the plan, in an attempt to reduce large institutions eradicating neighborhoods.  

Motley also weighed in against the Lower Manhattan Expressway which Robert Moses still advanced, despite 25 years of community opposition. She forecast that the planned Board of Estimate vote to designate the Haughwout Building (location of the first elevator) a landmark would finally end the project.

She successfully opposed the relocation of a concrete plant from 34th Street to 131st Street and the Harlem River. Instead, she persuaded the Board of Estimate to locate a park on the waterfront, although the space remained largely undeveloped until the 1990s. 

Borough President Motley did not confine her work to the borough of Manhattan.  The Annual Report includes her statement on the development of an industrial park in Flatlands, Brooklyn. She linked the matter to the desegregation of the City’s schools and urged the development of an educational park to advance integration. In a deeply-moving statement, she cited her commitment to integrated public education and noted that without completely integrating housing, the City needed to pursue alternatives to achieve the goal. “The next generation must be fully equipped to secure the jobs which are available…. The needs of factories in New York deserve consideration.  But so do the needs of children. I cannot approve the allocation of this entire site, a vast bloc of the city’s most precious resource—open land—without any provision for meeting the equally important problem of how to provide quality integrated education.

To the thousand of boys and girls in the ghettoes of Bedford Stuyvesant and Brownsville, the plan for an industrial park offers nothing. To a number of adults, who may commute from their suburban homes in segregated areas, this plan offers city-subsidized jobs.

I do not oppose jobs, but when a plan is proposed to provide these jobs that would also permanently preclude the breaking of racial barriers that divide children, that price is too high to pay.

It will not be my vote on the Board of Estimate which locks the door to the ghetto and throws away the key.”

She also was ahead of her time in trying to identify and root out conflicts of interest. She developed a three-question survey for her staff asking for a list of any entity in which the individual or family member held office, owned a financial interest or was employed by an outside organization.

In total, she served only 13 months as the Borough President. One wonders if Motley had continued as Borough President, what might have been different in our City.

Instead, though, Senator Robert Kennedy recommended her for a federal judgeship on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. When quizzed about this suggestion, Motley expressed skepticism that her name would advance through the Justice Department review, be submitted by President Lyndon B. Johnson and approved by the Senate. In an interview with the New York Post she offered her thoughts. “But even if such an appointment were contemplated, there would be the unlimited time to be consumed in investigation. You know that I have appeared before practically every federal district court in the South, before the 4th, 5th, and 6th Circuit Courts of Appeal, before the Supreme Court.

“Each of these lower court judges would be asked to evaluate me, and I don’t think some of the Southern judges involved would have had such a high opinion of me, considering the matters I brought before them.”

But, in 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson did nominate Motley for the position. The confirmation process took some time. As predicted there was pushback from Southern lawmakers.

She remained as Borough President while the nomination made its way through the confirmation process. During this time, Motley’s advocacy for the Harlem revitalization project continued. In August, she urged Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to construct a State office building in Harlem stating that it would increase employment and reduce tensions.

Upon confirmation, over the objections of Southern senators, she became the nation’s first Black woman federal judge, taking a pay cut. 

Constance Baker Motley became the chief judge of the District Court in 1982 and continued to serve as a judge until her death in 2005.

In January, 2024, the United States Postal Service honored her with a Black Heritage Stamp joining her legacy with that of hundreds of Black leaders like Harriett Tubman, A. Philip Randolph, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr.  Ella Fitzgerald, John Lewis and more. Let’s see what New York City can do to further commemorate this remarkable woman.

If these highlights pique your curiosity, check out the biography: Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by Tomiko Brown Nagin.