We have truly lost a legend. Constance Baker Motley;

Legendary civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley dies at 84




By LARRY NEUMEISTER
Associated Press Writer

September 28, 2005, 11:32 PM EDT

NEW YORK -- Constance Baker Motley, a federal judge who as a young lawyer represented Martin Luther King Jr. and played a pivotal role in reducing racial injustice in America in the 1960s, has died. She was 84.

Motley died of congestive heart failure at NYU Downtown Hospital on Wednesday morning, according to her son, Joel Motley III.

Early in her career, Motley fought blatant racism in many of the nation's landmark segregation cases. After a brief political career, she began a distinguished four-decade span as a judge in 1966, becoming the first black woman appointed to the federal bench.

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In 1945, she became a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, who was then chief counsel of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Over the next two decades, she worked on some of the nation's most famous civil rights cases, including preparing the draft complaint in 1950 for what would become Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan. She became the organization's associate counsel.

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Also in the early 1960s, she successfully argued for 1,000 school children to be reinstated in Birmingham, Ala., after the local school board had expelled them for demonstrating. She represented so-called "Freedom Riders" who rode buses to test the Supreme Court's 1960 ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation. During this time, she represented King as well, defending him and others in cases involving marches in Birmingham and Albany, Ga.

this great woman is family to another great woman who happens to post here.