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02/02/2021 01:00 PMA new educational and training program from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund (LDF) has been named after a notable Chester resident, Constance Baker Motley.
During the time in which Motley owned a home in Chester, from 1965 until her death in 2005, she earned recognition as the first Black woman to be elected to the New York State Senate and later, Manhattan borough president.
In 1966, she became the first Black woman federal judge. Prior to this appointment, Motley worked as a lawyer for 20 years with the NAACP LDF, litigating several landmark civil rights cases in the South.
The NAACP recognizes her significant contributions, along with those of the LDF’s founder and the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, with the Marshall-Motley Scholars Program (MMSP), announced on Jan. 18, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
The program aims to create “the next generation of civil rights attorneys to serve Black communities in the South,” according to LDF’s press release.
This area of the country is a particular focus, as “the majority of Black people in this country still live in the South and continuously face impediments to voting, education equity, and racial and economic justice,” said LDF President and Director-Counsel Sherrilyn Ifill in the release.
“This is the right time for LDF’s investment in the MMSP, and I am delighted that future civil rights attorneys will carry forth my mother’s legacy and continue the work she began as an LDF attorney,” said Joel Motley, Constance Baker Motley’s son, in the release.
The MMSP will remove many of the cost barriers of attending law school, covering tuition, room, board, and incidentals for participants. It will also offer summer internships, a fellowship with a racial justice law practice in the South, and special trainings, according to the LDF.
MMSP Director Jino Ray said the program is a “comprehensive lawyer development program that leaves no aspect of the scholars’ growth and development as civil rights attorneys up to chance.”
“To call racial injustice a thing of the past, we will need extremely passionate lawyers, impeccably trained and equipped to work alongside the activists and organizers who have long been committed to the work of dismantling the oppressive systems in the South,” said Ray.
The opening of LDF’s new southern regional office in Atlanta this year, along with the MMSP program, will continue the organization’s focus on the South, where LDF said it made financial investments in the creation of Black law firms in the 1960s and early ‘70s.
Motley, who wrote the first legal brief in the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, worked on several significant civil rights cases in the South during this time period, dealing with segregation in schools and public places.
“She did over 200 civil rights cases in the South including all the key civil rights campaigns, the Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom riders, the lunch counter sit ins,” said Marta Daniels, a longtime trustee on the board of the Chester Historical Society (CHS).
Daniels, who has immersed herself in learning about and documenting the life and work of Motley for CHS, said Motley worked alongside civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Jr..
“She was Martin Luther King’s on-call attorney, and was absolutely instrumental in his Birmingham campaign, when she won readmission of over a thousand young people who had been expelled from the school for marching,” said Daniels.
On the LDF’s launch of the MMSP, Daniels said, “I was just thrilled to see this, and I started collecting articles about it.”
Among the many ways in which the town of Chester has brought attention to Motley’s extraordinary accomplishments was a summer exhibit curated by Daniels at the Chester Museum at the Mill in 2017. The exhibit now exists in a smaller space on the second floor of the museum.
Videos on Judge Motley are also available on the Chester Historical Society’s YouTube channel, which can be accessed at chesterhistoricalsociety.org.
A more recent undertaking in town was creation of the Little Rock Nine Loop Trail on the Judge Constance Baker Motley Preserve, Motley’s former property at 100 Cedar Lake Road, which is now owned by the Chester Land Trust.
The Motley Preserve and her former home in Chester, which is privately owned, are sites on the Connecticut Freedom Trail, which recognizes the accomplishments of individuals from the state’s African American community.
The application deadline for the MMSP is Tuesday, Feb. 16. More information is available at MarshallMotleyScholars.org.