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02/06/2019 07:30 AMGoodness knows it is hard to keep a secret in a small town, but Marta Daniels has one—though she won’t have it for long. She is going to tell all on Thursday, Feb. 21 at a Chester Land Trust program at the Chester meeting house. The event, including a pre-program chili dinner, is a fundraiser for the Chester Land Trust.
Marta is going to talk about Constance Baker Motley, the first black woman to become a federal judge. That Motley had a weekend home in Chester from 1965 to her death in 2005 is no secret. The Chester Historical Society has done an exhibit on Motley, curated by Marta, and now her home and property are to be included on Connecticut’s Freedom Trail, which landmarks places associated with the African-American experience in the state.
According to Marta, what people do not know about Motley is the broad scope of her 20 years as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund before she became a judge in 1966. It is that civil rights history that Marta is eager to detail in her presentation.
“People only know her as a federal judge and she was so much more. She risked her life as a lawyer in the South when racism was white hot,” Marta says.
Motely wrote the original complaint for Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark desegregation decision in 1954, and she became the first black woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court when she successfully advocated James Meredith’s right to be admitted to the University of Mississippi. In fact, she argued 10 times before the court and won nine times outright. The case she lost she ultimately won when the original decision was overturned.
In all, Motley litigated some 200 cases in 11 southern states to ensure enforcement of Brown decision on school desegregation, and she served as Martin Luther King’s own attorney in many of the instances when he was jailed for his desegregation work.
When Marta began to research Motley’s life for a Chester Library program in 2014, she herself was amazed not only by the importance of her civil rights work and but also by the extent to which it had been overlooked. Even historian Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize winning, three-volume account of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, made no mention of Motley’s work.
“I was gobsmacked. I can’t tell you how shocked I was,” Marta says.
Marta researched everything about Motley she could get her hands on: Motley’s legal opinions, the autobiography the judge herself wrote, books by other civil rights leaders, television series like the PBS multi-part documentary Eyes on the Prize, and Justice is a Black Woman, a film about Motley made by Quinnipiac University and shown on Connecticut Public television.
Marta is working on a booklet that will cover Motley’s life with special details about her time in Chester, where she was a founding member of the Chester Historical Society. Motley loved not simply to relax on weekends but to cook, go to neighborhood restaurants, and entertain friends, among them local residents like the late Barbara and Edmund Delaney.
Marta herself has spent much of her life working in the arena of public policy on issues of peace and disarmament, justice, the environment, and race relations. As a young woman involved in the opposition to the war in Vietnam, she met Senator Eugene McCarthy, who challenged Lyndon Johnson for the presidential nomination in l968. McCarthy gave her an inscribed book of his poetry, Other Things and the Aardvark, written in 1970. When he suffered a heart attack in 1983, Marta wrote to him. He wrote a short note back to her: “Marta, call me.”
Marta’s involvement with social justice began as a teen in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. She grew up close to Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center that focused on issues of peace, justice, and civil rights, and became inspired by their programs and involved in their work.
After graduating from Juniata College in 1970, Marta went to Washington, intent on becoming a reporter. She was going to an interview at the Washington Post when she saw a sign on a telephone pole advertising a position at the Committee of Responsibility (COR), a group of medical professionals and clergy concerned with aiding children grievously injured by the war in Vietnam, most of them napalm victims. Given her own background in peace studies, Marta stopped in on her way back from the Post interview and met the director Donna Shor.
She calls that meeting with a person she describes as having led a life devoted to peace and justice a galvanizing moment.
“It transformed me,” she says.
When the Washington Post called to offer her a job, she turned it down and went to work for COR.
It was the beginning of a professional life devoted to working for environmental issues, peace studies, disarmament, a freeze on nuclear weapons, and economic conversion to provide a diversified job base in areas other than the defense industry. Marta has spoken and written widely on the issues with notable praise from such organizations as the American Library Association, which called her biography of peace advocate Elizabeth Evans Baker “a beautiful and useful book” that “provides a compelling history and practical guide to understanding a new discipline.”
Retired since 2005, Marta continues to write and research, completing a project that located the property on Barn Island off Stonington of Venture Smith, a former slave whose 1798 autobiography is the first such document by an African American author. Smith ultimately purchased not only his own freedom but that of his entire family by selling the vegetables grew on the island farm.
Today, Marta has a business devoted to early American antiques and she makes regular time to play her banjo. She jams weekly with a group of local string players—for pleasure, not performance—though she adds they occasionally do play in public.
“The whole idea is to play together, hear the nuances of the harmony,” she says.
She also plays with Bound to Have a Little Fun String Band, featuring old-time square dance music. The band, some 10 musicians from all over New England, has performed for more than 20 years at the Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine.
Music runs in Marta’s family. Her mother was a pianist, her father a mandolin player, and she has a cousin, Rick Voto, who was lead guitarist for Fleetwood Mac from 1987 to 1991.
Marta takes a long view of success on the issues to which she has devoted her life, citing a quotation from Nelson Mandela—”He said it’s always seems impossible until its done,” she points out.
Still, Marta is taking a more immediate view of the upcoming program on the importance and impact of Constance Bake Motley’s work.
“She is a heroine of the civil rights movement,” she says.
Program on Constance Baker Motley
MArta Daniels will lead a program on Constance Baker Motley at the Chester Land Trust Chili Dinner Fundraiser at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 21 (snow date Feb. 28) at the Chester Meeting House, 4 Liberty Street. Entry is a $25 donation; RSVP at probinson02@snet.net or by calling 860-526-2775. For more information, visit www.chesterlandtrust.org.