Before Constance Baker Motley was the first Black woman to sit on the federal bench, she was the lawyer the segregationists least wanted to see walk into their courtroom.
Motley spent two decades as a front-line litigator for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where Thurgood Marshall hired her as the organization's first female attorney while she was still finishing at Columbia Law School. She was the only woman on the LDF team that wrote the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education. She then spent years turning Brown from a principle into admissions letters, courtroom by hostile courtroom.
She argued ten cases before the United States Supreme Court and won nine. That is a record most appellate specialists who do nothing else for a living never approach, and Motley compiled it while also trying cases in the trial courts of the Deep South, where the danger was not losing a motion but the drive back to the hotel.
