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Motley,
who would have celebrated her 40th anniversary on the
bench next year, died Wednesday of congestive heart
failure at NYU Downtown Hospital, said her son, Joel
Motley III. She was 84.
"She
is a person of a kind and stature the likes of which
they're not making anymore," said Chief Judge Michael
Mukasey in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where Motley
served.
From
1961 to 1964, Motley won nine of 10 civil rights cases
she argued before the Supreme Court.
"Judge
Motley had the strength of a self-made star," federal
Judge Kimba Wood said. "As she grew, she was unfailingly
optimistic and positive -- she never let herself be
diverted from her goal of achieving civil rights, even
though, as she developed as a lawyer, she faced almost
constant condescension from our profession due to her
being an African-American woman."
Motley,
who spent two decades with the NAACP's Legal Defense
and Educational Fund, started out there in 1945 as a
law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, then its chief counsel
and later a Supreme Court justice. In 1950, she prepared
the draft complaint for what would become Brown v. Board
of Education.
In
her autobiography, "Equal Justice Under Law,"
Motley said defeat never entered her mind. "We
all believed that our time had come and that we had
to go forward."
The
Supreme Court ruled in her and her colleagues' favor
in 1954 in a decision credited with toppling public
school segregation in America while touching off resistance
across the country and leading to some of the racial
clashes of the 1960s.
In
the early 1960s, she personally argued the Meredith
case as well as the suit that resulted in the enrollment
of two black students at the University of Georgia.
"Mrs.
Motley's style could be deceptive, often allowing a
witness to get away with one lie after another without
challenging him," one of the students, journalist
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, wrote in her 1992 book, "In
My Place." But she would "suddenly threw a
curve ball with so much skill and power that she would
knock them off their chair."
Motley
also argued the 1957 case in Little Rock, Ark., that
led President Eisenhower to call in federal troops to
protect nine black students at Central High.
Also
in the early 1960s, she successfully argued for 1,000
school children to be reinstated in Birmingham, Ala.,
after the local school board expelled them for demonstrating.
She represented "Freedom Riders" who rode
buses to test the Supreme Court's 1960 ruling prohibiting
segregation in interstate transportation. During this
time, she represented the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
as well, defending his right to march in Birmingham
and Albany, Ga.
Motley
and the Legal Defense and Education Fund, committed
to a careful strategy of dismantling segregation through
the courts, were amazed by the emergence of more militant
tactics such as lunch-counter sit-ins, but she came
to believe that litigation was not the only road to
equality.
Recalling
a 1963 visit to King in jail, she remarked, "It
was then I realized that we did indeed have a new civil
rights leader -- a man willing to die for our freedom."
Motley
was born in New Haven, Conn., the ninth of 12 children.
Her mother, Rachel Baker, was a founder of the New Haven
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People. Her father, Willoughby Alva Baker,
worked as a chef for student organizations at Yale University.
It
was the beach incident that solidified the course her
life would take.
Though
her parents could not afford to send her to college,
a local philanthropist, Clarence W. Blakeslee, offered
to pay for her education after hearing her speak at
a community meeting.
Motley
earned a degree in economics in 1943 from New York University,
and three years later, got her law degree from Columbia
Law School.
In
the late 1950s, Motley took an interest in politics
and by 1964 had left the NAACP to become the first black
woman to serve in the New York Senate.
In
1965, she became the first woman president of the borough
of Manhattan, where she worked to promote integration
in public schools.
The
following year, President Johnson nominated her to the
federal bench in Manhattan. She was confirmed nine months
later, though her appointment was opposed by conservative
federal judges and Southern politicians.
Over
the next four decades, Motley handled a number of civil
rights cases, including her decision in 1978 allowing
a female reporter to be admitted to the New York Yankees'
locker room.
Motley
is survived by her husband and son, three sisters and
a brother.
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Associated
Press writer Karen Matthews contributed to this report.
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