
Civil Rights Queen2022
Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality
by Tomiko Brown-Nagin
"The first major biography of one of our most influential but least known judicial activists that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the 20th Century. Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected...