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| Judge Constance Baker Motley (AP Photo) |
The virtual evening event took place in recognition of what would have been Judge Motley's 100th birthday on Sept. 14, had she not died of heart failure in 2005. The screening and discussion were also part of the Constance Baker Motley Speaker Series on Racial Inequality, which the Connecticut Bar Association and the Connecticut Bar Foundation, a separate organization that supports legal service providers and access to justice efforts in Connecticut, produce in tandem.
After introductory remarks from Connecticut Bar Association president Cecil J. Thomas and Quinnipiac University law professor Marilyn J. Ford, Joel W. Motley, the jurist's son and managing director of the financial advisory firm Public Capital Advisors LLC, introduced a screening of the 2015 short documentary "The Trials of Constance Baker Motley." The on-demand film uses archival footage and interviews with Judge Motley's contemporaries to explore her career pre-judicial career. That path consisted primarily of a long stint with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund — during which she successfully argued Meredith v. Fair and eight other landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court — before dovetailing into a political career as Manhattan borough president.
Black-and-white video of white crowds brandishing Confederate flags and Southern politicians hurling racist epithets contrasted with interviews of Judge Motley, occasionally sitting alongside colleague and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, calmly discussing the pushback she encountered as she successfully advocated James Meredith's right to attend the University of Mississippi. In a 1966 clip, also included in the trailer, Judge Motley said that she was being considered for appointment to the federal bench; later that year, despite opposition from legislators who criticized her involvement in Meredith v. Fair and Brown v. Board of Education, she became a judge for the Southern District of New York and the first Black woman to hold a federal judgeship.
Joel W. Motley noted the intersection of his mother's legacy with the present racial justice moment, including the murder of George Floyd and Vice President Kamala Harris' reference to Judge Motley's influence in the 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, during the subsequent closing panel discussion.
"I think the attention to this story of Black folks [within] U.S. history is now front and center in a way that it hasn't been since the 1960s," he said.
In discussing the death of Floyd, which moderator and Yale Law School professor Kate Stith called a "lynching," Judge Motley's niece Constance L. Royster noted how devastated her aunt would have been "hurt to her core" by both Derek Chauvin's deadly act and other contemporary challenges to the civil rights she helped certify through the courts.
"I personally am glad that she was not here to see the lynching of George Floyd," said Royster, a veteran attorney and nonprofit fundraising professional who is the principal of Laurel Associates LLC. "Even though she was a very stoic person, no one was unaffected by that ... I'm also glad she's not here to see [the encroachment on] voting rights, and the entrenchment of housing segregation and educational opportunities [disparities]. I think that those, particularly would have been very painful for her."
Royster went on to compare the rhetoric and policies of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to 1960s governors like Arkansas' Orval Faubus and Alabama's George Wallace, whose refusal to comply with Supreme Court school desegregation orders made them symbols of embedded White supremacy during the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.
"We're going backwards, and it would not make her happy at all," Royster said. "At the same time, I would say that her position would be that you have to keep fighting. You have no choice but to fight."
Royster, Motley and Stith's co-panelists included Ford and University of Toledo College of Law dean emeritus Daniel J. Steinbock, who clerked for Judge Motley. Steinbock recalled a case in which New York welfare recipients charged the state with ignoring hearing victories and not providing the benefits to which they were entitled.
"One of [the fair hearing decisions] had written on it, 'file and forget,'" Steinbock recounted. "During the course of this trial, the judge slipped me a note that said, 'This is nullification, Northern style.' For those who know their American history, you'll know that Southern states, before the Civil War, claimed the right to nullify federal decisions, including the Constitution. And I remember, at the time, feeling proud because I was working for somebody who had that perspective."
Thomas told Law360 Pulse via email that the association was "proud to co-host the centennial commemoration of the birth of the Honorable Judge Constance Baker Motley."
"Our collaboration with the Connecticut Bar Foundation on the Constance Baker Motley Speaker Series on Racial Inequality has produced 14 well-attended and eye-opening events since its launch in July 2020," he added on Wednesday. "The series has challenged all of us to learn about and address the manifestations of racial inequality in the world around us."
--Editing by Peter Rozovsky.