How do you measure progress. The incrementalist encourages patience: A little is better than none, and half a loaf better than none.
Characteristically, Malcolm X wasn’t having any of that. In a televised round table in 1961, the civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley tried to coax Malcolm into acknowledging that the average Black American “is substantially better off than he was at the end of slavery.” He scorned the very premise. “Now you have 20 million Black people in America who are begging for some kind of recognition as human beings,” he said, referring to the Black Americans imprisoned at the time, “and the average white man today thinks we’re making progress.”
It’s an evocative exchange, one that the Harvard legal historian Tomiko Brown-Nagin showcases to illuminating effect in “Civil Rights Queen,” the first major biography of Motley, a decade in the making. Brown-Nagin juxtaposes Motley’s attempts to find common ground by asking a series of lawyerly questions (“You recognize, don’t you …? “Don’t you think …?”) with Malcolm’s scathing rejoinders. By the mid-1960s, Motley had been caught “in a bind,” Brown-Nagin writes. Since 1946, she was a key figure in using the courts for the dismantling of Jim Crow laws. Motley had helped litigate Brown v. Board of Education; she fought for Martin Luther King Jr.’s right to march in Birmingham. But to radicals disenchanted with the mainstream civil rights movement, she was “weak and accommodationist,” Brown-Nagin writes. Set against figures like Malcolm, “her politics and style looked tamer — and they were.”
Motley wasn’t necessarily accepted into the halls of American power. As Brown-Nagin shows in this thoughtful biography, Motley was lambasted by one side as “a pawn of the white establishment,” but she was sometimes criticized by elements of that white establishment for not being moderate enough.
President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Lyndon B. Johnson to the Southern District of New York. She was the first Black woman to become a federal judge. Many people feared that her identity would make it biased. She was constantly challenged by them. During her confirmation hearings, she was accused of being a Communist — which was ironic, considering that as a judge Motley would regularly enforce the property rights of business owners. “In her courtroom,” Brown-Nagin writes, “no less than in any other, larger corporate entities with greater resources — big business — prevailed.”
The federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan was a world away from Motley’s childhood in New Haven, Conn., where she was born, the ninth child of 12, to parents who had immigrated from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father had been a Yale steward for a while, her mother was a homemaker. Speaking at a community center, a 19-year-old Motley so impressed a local philanthropist that he paid for the rest of her education — first at Nashville’s Fisk University, then at New York University and eventually at Columbia Law School.
Motley would recall her experiences as a Black girl growing up in Connecticut, which was in stark contrast with what she saw in the South. “Fear and racial conflict were simply not a part of the landscape,” she recalled. Brown-Nagin, for her part, says that Motley clung to “one of the enduring yet long-contested myths about American race relations” — that racism was primarily a Southern problem — and “downplayed the extent of racism in the North.”
Brown-Nagin does this now and again — providing an intermittent critique while recounting the story of an exceptional life that she manifestly admires. (Brown-Nagin’s previous book, the Bancroft Prize-winning “Courage to Dissent,” included a chapter on Motley.) It’s a judicious impulse that Motley, who wanted to be a lawyer from the time she was a high school student, might have appreciated — though it can be hard to tell, since “Civil Rights Queen” isn’t quite an intimate biography. Brown-Nagin focuses mainly on Motley’s life in the courtroom, as both an attorney and a judge, with only an occasional glance at her personal life, which included a happy, supportive marriage and one child, a son.
“Civil Rights Queen” is the result of diligent research; Brown-Nagin sifted through the literature, pored through the archives, talked to Motley’s clerks. We learn that when Motley interviewed with Thurgood Marshall, who was then special counsel to the Inc Fund, he asked her to climb a ladder next to a bookshelf because “he wanted to inspect her legs and feminine form.”
Brown-Nagin situates this incident (“alleged,” she takes care to note) in terms of the ambient chauvinism of the time and Marshall’s reputation as a “Romeo”; the book as a whole offers little else by way of gossip or Motley’s own idiosyncrasies, beyond what Motley herself was willing to reveal in her memoir. (Published in 1998, that memoir doesn’t mention any specifics about the job interview, recalling only Marshall’s “total lack of formality”: “For whatever reason, I don’t remember much else.”) Brown-Nagin repeatedly describes Motley as “stately,” “steely,” “stylishly dressed” — as if her impeccable self-presentation was a form of armor, which Brown-Nagin suggests it was: “She protected herself; only a select few could peek behind the mask.”
Some of the most poignant episodes in the book recount the harrowing experiences of Motley and her clients in the South — risking their lives in their persistent efforts to make the country measure up to its stated ideals. Brown-Nagin explains that Motley had to be pragmatic, just like other lawyers at Inc Fund. She held clients to the highest standards of respectability politics and tossed aside anyone who could jeopardize a case. But Motley also counseled exhausted and frightened clients to persist, ensuring that all the hard work they had put in wouldn’t be in vain.
It was not always easy, but it was transformative. “Civil Rights Queen” is a balanced assessment of a brave and brilliant woman who helped to reconfigure the system before she became a part of it. Brown-Nagin ends by observing that, as a judge, Motley wasn’t the “gladiator” she once had been; she delivered a few “groundbreaking” opinions, but was known mainly for her fairness and dedication. Reflecting on this “paradox of opportunity” for the outsider who becomes an insider, Brown-Nagin honors her subject by being resolutely direct and unsentimental — steely, if you will. “The power structure does not fundamentally transform,” she writes. “At best, it accommodates difference.”
Source: NY Times
