Civil Rights QueenCivil Rights Queen

Brown-Nagin captures the story of Constance Baker Motley, a remarkable figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first Black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only Black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first Black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. --From publisher description.