Constance Baker Motley : Unsung Heroine is My Distant Cousin

I have watched the banishment of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds on MSNBC. The roar of the crowd of 10, 000 people who cheered. The solemn act of taking down a symbol of treason and racism by the integrated honor guard  spoke volumes about a new day for the state. But one would be truly kidding themselves into believing that this means that a new generation will begin building new bridges of peace and understanding. We have to learn from history in order not to repeat it. 

My father's side of the family originated from the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean and lived in New Haven, Connecticut.  Rachel Huggins and McCullough Alva Baker, her parents, were immigrants who worked as a domestic worker and chef, respectively, at Yale University. McCullough was a  cousin of my father, William Tyson. While growing up, she attended integrated schools but met with instances of racism. Upon her entrance to high school, her desire to be involved in civil rights came to being when a speech by Yale Law School graduate George Crawford, a civil rights attorney for the New Haven Branch of the NAACP, inspired Baker to attend law school. She attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee &, later, moved back north and attended and graduated New York University. After getting her Bachelors of Arts degree from NYU she was accepted to Columbia University School of Law where she received her degree. After her second year at Columbia's Law School, future U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall hired her as a law clerk.

Constance was hired by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as a civil rights lawyer after graduating from Columbia's Law School in 1946. She was their first female attorney and became Associate Counsel to the Legal Defense Fund, making her a lead trial attorney in a number of early and significant civil rights cases. Her jail visits with Martin Luther King and Medger Evers, working with churches which were fire bombed and protest marches kept her focused on the front lines of the civil rights movement. 

Not only did she write the original complaint of Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1950, she was the first African American woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court. In Meredith vs. Fair, she successfully won James Meredith's effort to be the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962. She successfully won in nine of the ten cases she argued before the Supreme Court.  A key legal strategist in the civil rights movement, her gifts were instrumental in helping to desegregate Southern schools, buses, and lunch counters. Which is why I believe this lowering of the Confederate flag in South Carolina was 54 years in the making. A huge amount of resistance from South Carolina to bring down the  Confederate flag after it was raised over the Statehouse to commemorate the Civil War centennial. The following year, lawmakers passed a law requiring that it continue to fly. It was the middle finger given, in my opinion, by "good old boy" politicians who luxuriated in white privilege.

In 1962, Constance Baker Motley called the fight for James Meredith's enrollment at the University of Mississippi "the last battle of the Civil War." We still have a number of Southern states that fly some form of the battle flag on their state grounds. I believe this battle has only just begun.

I created this animated short film titled Race For Coffee - I believe, if she had lived, she would find this commentary amusing.

 https://youtu.be/n_yJmoNGrh0