Leon Edel, the celebrated biographer of Henry James, famously observed that practicing his art was a little like falling in love. But the affair, “however exhilarating, has to be terminated if a useful biography is to emerge.” Given an understandable admiration for her subject, the challenge facing Tomiko Brown-Nagin was formidable. She had to maintain a passionate connection with Constance Baker Motley without lapsing into hagiography and, on the other hand, set out the missteps that always emerge in any serious contemplation of a life. “In the writing of the life,” as Edel put it, “changes occur, discoveries are made. Realities emerge.” Brown-Nagin has largely met the challenge—though some reservations will follow—producing a readable, comprehensively researched, and evocative life of a woman who cut an extraordinary figure in the law and whose “heroic achievements,” as Henry Louis Gates Jr. said of them, deserve far more attention than they have received.With the present-day emergence of Black women as leaders in a variety of professions and, even more to the point, one—at this writing—on the verge of joining the United States Supreme Court,1 this is clearly the time for a biography of Motley (who died in 2005 at the age of 84), a great female Black lawyer and judge at a time when few women, Black or White, could boast of appearing in any major legal forum. Having observed her at work over the course of many years, I can attest that regardless of race or gender, she was as powerful a courtroom figure as the last century can boast.If Motley could have chosen her biographer, she couldn’t have done better than Brown-Nagin, who has very much walked the walk. She comes to the task as an award-winning historian and Harvard Law School professor, the author of Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (2011), a complex story in which Motley was a major figure. Unusual for civil rights history, the book (for perhaps the first time) unpacked in detail deeply felt community tensions and class divisions in the effort to integrate the public schools of a major southern city. In a respectful and farsighted review, legal historian Kenneth Mack described the book as a granular narrative that pointed out, inter alia, the limits of the classic approach of centralized control from NAACP Legal Defense Fund lawyers in desegregation cases. It was “civil rights history from the bottom up.” While Civil Rights Queen is not a book that sheds much light on her subject’s inner life, Brown-Nagin is a formidable scholar who seems perfectly suited to take the full measure of a woman hardly remembered until recently. Constance Baker Motley’s presence and performance placed her near the center of every arena she entered in a long, distinguished, and, as Brown-Nagin also described her in Courage to Dissent, oft-controversial career.What follows is in three parts. First, part I is this reviewer’s assessment of the biography. The bottom line: if you are interested in civil rights history, a cameo of 1960s New York State politics, or what the first Black female federal judge faced from not only some Manhattan litigators but also judicial colleagues, then get this book from your public library or purchase Civil Rights Queen from a local bookstore or even for your Kindle. You won’t regret it.Second, in part II I’ll write not as a reviewer but as a witness who was a colleague of Motley’s for almost five years; as a judge, she appointed me to represent criminal defendants. Some of my testimony here is seriously at odds with Brown-Nagin’s narrative. As the last and, alas, only living lawyer hired by Thurgood Marshall at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) before he joined the Second Circuit Court of Appeals—a time when Motley was a highly placed staff lawyer—I have both experience and memories that do not always jibe with Brown-Nagin’s conclusions. There may, however, be many views on the issues in question. Mine are, of course, what I believe to be the accurate ones, but like the opinions and memories of any witness, they are properly subject to the scrutiny that any testimony, especially as to matters that reach back in time, deserves. As I hope I was clear about in my own memoirs of the period in question, the book on history is never closed.2Finally, in part III I want to address a topic largely untouched by Civil Rights Queen—though ever present in Courage to Dissent—but clearly suggested by Motley’s career and of continued great importance: the promise, achievements, defeats, and limitations of litigation as a vehicle for advancing equality.Motley’s life story isn’t a rags-to-riches fairy tale, but it does read as Lincolnesque. Arguably the two most important interventions in her career were the funding of her higher education by the wealthy White businessman Clarence Blakeslee—his construction company built the Croton aqueduct that brings drinking water to New York City—and her hiring as a student law clerk and then staff lawyer by Thurgood Marshall. Both decisions reflected her obvious intelligence, work ethic, and capacity for growth, but they were each unexpected and very much cut against the grain of the way women of Motley’s race and class were treated in the 1930s and ’40s.Motley came from a large West Indian family (lower middle class, as she put it) that immigrated to New Haven, Connecticut, from the Caribbean island of Nevis. In a home environment dominated by a stern and demanding father, education was deeply valued. Willoughby Baker was physically imposing, a trait he passed on to his daughter. For many years, he worked as a chef at Yale University, often preparing meals for the elite male members of the secret society Skull and Bones. Blakeslee entered Motley’s life serendipitously. He heard the precocious youth speak at a public meeting explaining why Black people hadn’t much used the community center facilities he had built for them (there were no Black members on the governing board, she argued). At the time, Motley was only fifteen years old, though she pointed out that given her appearance, she seemed much older. In recognition of the great potential he saw in her and his commitment to raise the fortunes of the Black community, Blakeslee offered to pay for both her college and law school education.After a series of 1930s youthful flirtations with the radical left that would later provide fodder for the efforts of segregationist lawmakers in the United States Senate to block her confirmation as a federal judge, she attended college at all-Black Fisk University in Nashville—her first deep experience of a Jim Crow environment—and then transferred to NYU. She entered Columbia Law School during the Second World War, when admission of the few women was certainly aided by the number of males who were off fighting the war. After her first research job clerking with Marshall in 1945, at a time when the LDF was still part of the NAACP, she was hired after her graduation as a staff lawyer. She often said that if Marshall had not hired her, no one would have ever heard of Constance Baker Motley. I doubt this—no matter the field of endeavor, her talents were such that she would make a mark—but it is, of course, true that then and for many years thereafter bigoted hiring practices at law firms were commonplace.At about the same time, Marshall brought on board Jack Greenberg, who had returned from commanding a Navy landing craft in the brutal invasion of the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima and had also graduated from Columbia Law. Both Motley and Greenberg filled the roles of junior staffers while the small group of NAACP lawyers in New York and a national network of other lawyers and academics plotted the series of higher education cases from Texas and Oklahoma that set the stage for the ultimate attack on Plessy v. Ferguson’s approval of separate but equal schooling. Brown-Nagin labors a bit dealing with Motley’s role in the handling of Brown v. Board itself, which was in fact minor. She certainly prepared a draft of the complaint used to initiate the Kansas case; it is unclear whether it was amended by others or used in the Virginia and South Carolina cases. She doesn’t appear to be listed as counsel on court documents initiating the case, and she didn’t argue any of the five cases that ultimately were presented to the Supreme Court. While all the principal lawyers in the Brown cases were male, it is unlikely that in the 1950s any gender blockage, explicit or implicit, played a role in their selection. The lawyers involved were far more experienced than she was; most of them came from the jurisdictions in which the cases emerged. Greenberg was selected to argue the Delaware case because of a specific connection to the state. She is barely mentioned—and one mention is a pejorative quote from a “colleague”—in Richard Kluger’s authoritative history of Brown, Simple Justice. Six of the nine male lawyers in the classic picture of the 1954 group of lawyers taken on the steps of the Supreme Court building were NAACP-cooperating attorneys who hailed from the South or the District of Columbia. The others were Marshall, Robert Carter, and Greenberg.Still, the way the NAACP legal team operated was highly collaborative. Motley was trusted by Marshall and present at many of the key meetings and court arguments. He sent her to Mississippi in 1949 in an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to force the state to pay Black teachers and administrators what it paid Whites. While discreet in the way good lawyers are supposed to be, it is highly likely she voiced her opinions in the heated strategy debates over the strategic and tactical choices that the lawyers faced in deciding whether and how to move ahead, but her major role in the decade leading to Brown was as the NAACP’s and later LDF’s leading lawyer dealing with rampant discrimination in housing.Curiously, Motley never mentions the many residential housing discrimination cases she fought (and mostly lost) in her autobiography, Equal Justice Under Law (1998); Brown-Nagin barely touches them. This is perhaps a reminder that lawyers take cases as they are; even great lawyers lose cases. When journalists note, as they seem to do obsessively, that a lawyer has argued a certain number of cases and has a winning batting average, that may say as much about the cases as the quality of the advocacy.3Motley’s major responsibility during the years when her colleagues were intensely focused on the steps leading to the the 1954 and 1955 school desegregation decisions was a series of ambitious housing discrimination cases in Shreveport, Louisiana; Savannah, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and Detroit, Michigan. Only the Detroit public housing case was in any way successful. While not listed as counsel, she plainly advised Marshall in the tragic 1949 losing effort to quash the exclusion of Black people at Metropolitan Life’s massive lower Manhattan Stuyvesant Town housing project. The New York courts ruled that the project sponsor was a private entity and that under the state law at the time, MetLife could discriminate as it saw fit. Ironically, the company later built a “separate but equal” high rise on the edge of Harlem where Motley and colleagues Robert Carter and Marshall would for a time reside.The housing cases were all extremely difficult both legally and politically. Violent resistance from White homeowners was common. Many of the racist practices challenged would not be ruled illegal until the late 1960s, and, of course, implementatation of even the new laws has always been weak. Residential housing segregation, both public and private, has remained largely unabated in the United States to this day.4 But housing litigation, not working on public school integration, would during these years be at the center of Motley’s work; for example, she filed the Savannah case in 1954, four days after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board. In 2021, a graduate of Duke Law School, Donovan Stone, published a fifty-three-page, 411-footnotes article in the Utah Law Review entitled Constance Baker Motley’s Forgotten Housing Legacy. Apparently both Motley—a senior status federal judge when she wrote her autobiography—and her biographer had forgotten too.It was the years that followed Brown until she left LDF in the mid-sixties that mark the full flowering of Motley’s powerful and persistent advocacy in major desegregation cases. Her housing litigation history may have been forgotten, but she is well remembered as the lead lawyer in the remarkable series of higher education cases she brought, managed, tried, and appealed aiming to open up universities in Alabama, Mississippi (aided here importantly by my LDF office mate Derrick Bell), Georgia, and South Carolina. These cases were vigorously contested. Obvious segregation was still denied by university officials. The prospective Black students were vilified. Fears of campus violence were ever present. Motley was constantly under threat, especially at the time of the murder of Mississipppi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, a close colleague. There were federal judges who declined to order admission who had to be overruled by appellate courts. And, of course, the riot and federal intervention at Ole Miss in 1962 is a prominent marker in civil rights–era history. Brown-Nagin takes the reader carefully through this phase of Motley’s career, demonstrating her courage, forbearance through numerous court appearances before hostile judges, and legal smarts under enormous pressure. It was here and in dealing with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s right to march in Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, that she became, at least to Black and liberal constituencies, a public figure.Her brief career as a politician followed these remarkable courtroom successes and the name recognition that came with them. Though, at first, she remained second in command at LDF on a part-time basis, powerful Harlem and Tammany Hall political leader J. Raymond Jones—known to all as The Fox—had fingered Motley in 1964 to fill a vacancy as the first Black female New York state senator. In short order she was reelected, but after serving just a year, she became, again with muscle from Jones, the first female borough president of Manhattan and finally left LDF in 1966, twenty years after she had been hired by Marshall.Brown-Nagin unearths the tangled political moves that brought her to service in these posts, events likely unfamiliar to even close followers of Motley’s career. Democratic political operatives fought over influence and control of candidate selection and various positons in local government. Motley seemed a step removed, almost a mere observer of much of this typical sausage-making process, even though she was the subject of some of the controversies. She was ultimately drawn into supporting a candidate opposed by Robert Kennedy who would later turn cool after his initial support of her judgeship.As significant as the barrier-breaking aspects of her selection were, Brown-Nagin, unlike Motley in her autobiography, makes much—too much, in my view—of her actual achievements in both posts. Her policy initiatives in her brief time in the state Senate were progressive, but they consisted of bills that either failed to pass or worked but small changes. Brown-Nagin also treats her short tenure as borough president, which included service as a member of the City’s Board of Estimate, as if it amounted to a more powerful position than was the case. The Board, a unique New York City institution, had then the power to pass on major municipal policy decisions, but it was well understood by New Yorkers that while the five borough presidents along with other City officers had votes, Board decisions were regularly dictated by political operatives and the mayor’s office.5Motley’s two years as a politician ended in 1966 when President Johnson nominated her to the federal bench. While Brown-Nagin describes Motley’s political engagement in some detail, nothing about the experience rivals the drama or import of her post–Brown v. Board civil rights work. Her reputation was such that LBJ had originally planned to name her to the court of appeals, but he was ultimately persuaded that confirmation politics were such that he should go instead with a district court position. It appears that Bobby Kennedy’s lack of enthusiasm played a role in the decision.Motley was a federal trial court judge for decades, becoming, due to seniority, the chief judge of the Southern District of New York in the early 1980s and taking senior status in 1986. Brown-Nagin describes several of her high-profile decisions as well as a series of indignities, what today might be called microaggressions or worse, visited on her by a few lawyers and judicial colleagues. To give but one example of many, at a judicial seminar, after extensive descriptions of other (male) participants, a fellow judge introduced her as simply having “served on the board of United Church Women and the board of trustees of the YWCA.” Former Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, co-chairing the event, was shocked. He took the microphone and proceeded to give a full account of the ten cases she had argued before him while he served on the Supreme Court. Motley displayed the same sangfroid in reacting to these slights that had characterized her mode of dealing with bigotry in the South. She took note of the insulting behavior, memorializing it for later use, but took action only when it was clearly called for. Her sense of self—of who she was—was unaffected. She was a favorite of her law clerks, and an objective assessment of her judicial record shows a willingness to advance the law in the service of fairness and equity even when doing so might ask the court of appeals to do likewise for the first time. It should be remembered that while Brown-Nagin accurately presents summaries of her more notable cases, the overwhelming business of a federal trial judge involves the efficient management and deciding of cases that are of moment only to the litigants involved. In decades as a federal judge, such unremembered quotidian lawsuits are what took up the vast majority of Motley’s time and energy.I will comment here on but two of these cases, one that received great public attention and another in which she appointed me as counsel that remains obscure. Both represent her willingness to take risks to advance the law toward her conception of justice as well as the lawyerly care with which she moved forward. In 1969, she heard a case involving Black Muslim and prison reformer Martin Sostre, who had been held in solitary confinement for over a year at Green Haven Prison while serving a sentence for a drug-related crime that he claimed was a result of being framed by the police. Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, a Marxist, and a writer of incendiary revolutionary tracts. He was also a thorn in the side of prison authorities, having earlier won a landmark ruling establishing the right to practice his religion, a case that widened a crack in the then-prevailing “hands off” doctrine that protected prison authorities from judicial intervention.After a long trial featuring powerful expert testimony about the impact of long-term isolation on the mind and body, Motley ruled that Sostre’s treatment by the state was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. She ordered that he not be removed from the general population and that before solitary could be used by wardens certain due process procedures had to be followed, and she protected the status of his jailhouse lawyering. With respect to a warden’s seizure of Sostre’s writings, she found, “It is not a function of our prison system to make prisoners conform in their political thought and belief to ideas acceptable to their jailers.” Motley also awarded Sostre over $10,000 in damages. Her extensive decision was controversial, lauded by many as bold, humane, and long overdue and reviled by others as empowering criminals and hamstringing correctional officials. Brown-Nagin devotes considerable attention to those who believed the decision of momentous importance and less to its ultimate resolution.The Sostre case is a great example of Motley breaking new ground in the service of personal dignity and pushing back at ill treatment in prison, but it is an overstatement to claim it had a more general effect on solitary-confinement policy. While she wrote a wide-ranging opinion after an extensive trial, only now, decades later, is there significant momentum to restrict a practice that amounts in many respects to torture and is often totally unnecessary. These efforts have been met with but partial success, even after solitary confinement has been criticized by a Supreme Court justice and President Obama. Indeed, in a tendentious and cringe-worthy opinion reviewing her decision, the court of appeals, unusually sitting en banc, ruled that although the conditions Sostre endured were severe, “we cannot agree with the district court that they were ‘so foul, so inhuman, and so violative of basic concepts of decency.’” In a finding that today seems painful in its moral blindness but probably reflected the law of the day, Judge Irving Kaufman found that Sostre was at fault because he could have been released from solitary confinement if he had only agreed to participate in group therapy meetings. Motley’s orders were upheld with respect to communications between a prisoner and counsel and to a prisoner’s writings, though even here the court imposed some limitations. In short, Motley’s pushing-the-envelope decision energized many but failed to change the law of solitary. We will return to the relation of litigation to social change in part III.Despite the court of appeals’ treatment of her Sostre decision, Motley was undeterred in finding constitutional violations when she believed the facts warranted them. In 1970, after almost ten years at LDF, I joined the faculty of Columbia Law School. Because of my familiarity with criminal law, I received requests to represent indigent defendants in cases pending before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. One day in 1972, I got a phone call from Roberta Thomas, Judge Motley’s longtime secretary and confidant, telling me that the judge hoped I would take on the case of James C. Haynes, a Black man who had been convicted of robbery and grand larceny in the New York state courts and believed his constitutional rights had been violated. As in Sostre, Motley had been randomly selected to decide his claims. Roberta explained that Haynes was indigent and had no counsel. The opportunity to appear before the judge was such that I agreed to take on the case (not mentioned in Civil Rights Queen) as counsel without knowing any of the facts.It turned out that Haynes, who was being held in state prison, had taken his case through the state courts and lost. He claimed he had an alibi for the night of the robbery, but in a case like this a factual question like acceptance of an alibi defense didn’t count; only violation of a federal constitutional right would get him a new trial. After studying the trial record, with the help of a Columbia student in a clinical law course I was teaching, I filed a petition arguing that Haynes had been implicated in a co-defendant’s confession and should have been tried alone and that he was denied counsel at a police-held lineup. I had little confidence in these claims, and indeed Motley rejected them. I relied most on a long series of pointed remarks by the prosecutor in his summation before the jury. While he never outright said convict this man because he is Black, the prosecutor could be easily understood as demeaning Haynes and his race. I argued this prejudiced his right to a fair trial.Some of the prosecuting attorney’s remarks were as follows:I know that [petitioner’s state counsel] Mr. Gold, in his experience, he has dealt with people for many years of the colored race. There is something about it, if you have dealt with colored people and have been living with them and see them you begin to be able to discern their mannerisms and appearances and to discern the different shades and so on. Any of you that have never been exposed to them would never be able to. I don’t see, I have been exposed to some degree, that isn’t what I am getting at. What I am getting at is those who are living with them, dealing with them, and working with them in a sense, have a much better opportunity to evaluate what they see to identify what they see.Now, counsel for the defendants told you, and Attorney Gold is probably as well versed with the colored race as any man I know in the legal profession. He knows their weaknesses and inability to do certain things that maybe are commonplace for the ordinary person to do or remember or know certain things.Here she is, a young girl about 13 [referring to a prosecution witness, who was Black]. And I know that you have recalled this young McCray girl, who is the tall sister of Jones. That young lady [also Black] had her first baby at 15. She is now married at 16 with another baby on the way. The maturity among these people becomes quite evident quite quickly.It gets confusing when you talk to some of these youngsters like that because they don’t express themselves as clearly as you and I might possibly be able to do so.Eyvonne Martin true enough is 13 years old. Again I point to the fact she is a colored girl. She knows her own. She knows the young bucks in that neighborhood and she knew Terry Cox [petitioner’s co-defendant].I know that it is the custom and the habit of many colored people to try and straighten their hair. I don’t know what the reason for it is. But in any event it is not uncommon to observe colored people with a heavy pomade grease or hair dressing in their hair. It is also not uncommon to find colored people with somewhat exotic hairdos, male and female. Most of the exotic hair-dos take the form of a skull cap type hair-do, plastered down. You may have seen this. Others are taking the trend of the current day, of the long hair. It seems to be a fad. May I say that I cannot participate in that. The tendency on the part of these faddists, if I can call them that, is that they use this black bandana type, you have seen it, to hold the hair down. The effect of this grease is to straighten that hair out. And that would bring the hair down. The long hair as described by Mrs. Balon, being pulled down, plastered down on the side of the head and by Investigator Demler, who described it as long. This is not the type of sideburns that we usually think of when we think of sideburns.We argued, and Judge Motley found, that these overt racial referces crossed the line of fair comment and constituted an invitation to the jury to base its verdict not on the evidence in the case but on the petitioner’s race, bolstered by the failure of the trial judge to intervene. In this way, the prosecuting attorney had treated Haynes as if he were other than a member of a group of regular human beings, effectively communicating his own hostility toward the defendant to the jury in a manner totally inconsistent with the fair and impartial jury trial which was petitioner’s right under the Fourteenth Amendment.Motley held, “The court holds that such prosecutorial argument, in the presence of a jury, is a trial error of constitutional magnitude. Indeed, where a prosecutor maligns a defendant’s race before the jury, the very integrity of the trial process is destroyed and the trial becomes little more than a mockery of justice.” Viewing the case with twenty-first-century eyes, you might think it a slam dunk. Nothing like that was true in 1972.The state responded to the ruling by arguing that even if the prosecutor’s language was tasteless it didn’t amount to a violation of the Constitution and pressing the point that there was much evidence of Haynes’s guilt. Any error was harmless; Haynes would have been convicted regardless. The judge rejected this claim on the ground that when a prosecuting attorney makes prejudicial remarks to a jury concerning a defendant’s race, creed, or color, the error destroys the fundamental fairness required in dealing with the jury. But the state’s position was worrisome. Federal courts did not like upsetting state court verdicts, and there were no successful cases just like this one. A Sostre-like appeals court could look high-minded by condemning the prosecutor’s behavior but still keep the defendant in prison by finding the error harmless. Motley had cited a raft of cases, but the arguable indirectness of the language made the Haynes ruling an unusual one; once again she had fearlessly confronted racial injustice, evoking for me now a remark she made to Lynn Huntley, one of her clerks, in another case where she ordered a retrial after both lawyers before her had made numerous racial references:I said to the judge when I learned of her decision that it might be overturned on the grounds of “harmless error,” in light of the mass of independent evidence of the defendant’s guilt. All the judge said to me, half glasses pulled down on her nose, was, “Let those judges on the Second Circuit tell me that I don’t know racism when I see it.”Fortunately for Mr. Haynes, we drew a friendly panel for the state’s appeal. Vermonter James Oakes agreed with Motley’s approach. Former Fordham Law School dean William Mulligan believed that references to “these people” were racially coded. The only dissenter was Paul Hays, Motley’s former teacher at Columbia. He thought the prosecutor remarks “vulgar” but on the right side of the law because he never said, “Blacks are more likely to commit crimes than Whites.”I was, of course, happy with the result, pleased to be of service to my former colleague, and impr