Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography - Softcover

Motley, Constance Baker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374526184 ISBN 13: 9780374526184

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Synopsis

This wise and affecting memoir is the inside story of the great efforts leading up to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the fight to implement it--and its implications for affirmative action and black poverty today.

A black woman who moved in the corridors of power in the middle of this century, Constance Baker Motley has been a pioneer in both black civil rights and women's rights. As the key attorney assisting Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, she argued a dozen cases before the Supreme Court (winning all but one), and her representation of James Meredith in his bid to enroll in the University of Mississippi made her famous. Subsequently, as Manhattan borough president and a U.S. district court judge, she has fulfilled the highest aspirations of our legal and political system.

Equal Justice Under Law, the most detailed account to date of the legal conflicts of the civil rights movement, is also an account of Motley's struggle, as a black woman, to succeed, a record of a life lived with great courage and responsibility.

About this title

About the Author

Constance Baker Motley is a senior judge and a former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. She lives in Manhattan and Chester, Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Equal Justice Under Law

An AutobiographyBy Constance Baker Motley

Farrar Straus Giroux

Copyright © 1999 Constance Baker Motley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780374526184

Chapter One

NEW HAVEN, 1921-41

    IN JANUARY 1975, I BEGAN LEAFING THROUGH AN OLD BOOK THAT WASKEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY IN A SMALL WOODEN BOX WITH A GLASS TOPin the back of St. John's Anglican Church on Nevis, a tiny island in theeastern Caribbean. For the sake of tourists, the book had been opened to the recordationof the marriage of Lord Horatio Nelson, then stationed in Antigua, to the widowFrances Nisbet on March 11, 1787. Nevis has another claim to fame: AlexanderHamilton, first United States secretary of the treasury, was born there in 1755. Ilooked at every brown page of that timeworn document for evidence of myancestral past. Both my parents were born and reared on that island. I wasintrigued by a 1758 notation that reads: "John Huggins, mulatto, property ofMiss Huggins, baptized." My mother was a Huggins. She had a brother, nephew,and great-nephew named John Huggins. A notorious Englishman, EdwardHuggins, and his two brothers (according to the local Tourist Bureau literature)were major slave owners prior to 1833 and were undoubtedly responsible for thefact that many people on the island of Nevis and their descendants, both blackand white, are surnamed Huggins.

    The rector at St. John's had stopped writing in the old church record book in1826, when England required the rector of each parish to keep a systematic recordof all christenings, marriages, and deaths and furnishedprinted record books for this purpose. It took about two hours, with thehelp of my husband and son, for me to leaf through the printed recordsfrom 1826 to 1934, the year my paternal grandmother died.

    Several former slaves and their descendants, as the printed church recordsdisclose, took the surname Huggins on being baptized. The rectorapparently insisted that the new Christian have a Christian name. Some ofthe former slaves, perhaps bewildered by this requirement, took the surnameof the rector, Pemberton, who, in 1826, started baptizing slaves, as revealedby the column headed "Occupation." The newly baptized slaves and formerslaves thus became Englishmen with black faces. The mulatto children ofplantation-owner Englishmen in the eighteenth century who were baptizedwere also recorded as such. My mother's father, Alexander Huggins, was amulatto. She had an older brother named Edward Huggins. She namedone of my brothers Edward.

    In anticipation of freedom, in 1833--the start of the official four-yearperiod of transition from slave to free man--the occupation of former slaveswho were christened was recorded not as "slave" but as "apprentice." England'splan for ending slavery on this Caribbean island possession was tohave the slaves work five days a week for the master, as usual, and two daysa week for wages during the transition period so that they could learn howto become paid workmen. Earlier, the slave owners had been required tolist, every three years, each slave by name so that if slavery ended the slaveowner could be paid for the loss of his property. Each slave had beenassigned an acre or less of land for growing his or her own food. The slaveowners had decided that it was too expensive to import food to feed slaves.The sugar plantations were generally on low ground close to the CaribbeanSea. Nevis is otherwise very hilly, with a dormant volcano at its centercalled Nevis Peak, which Columbus reportedly spotted on his second voyageto the New World. Legend has it that the peak reminded him of one ofthe Swiss Alps, because it is usually enshrouded by white clouds, like snow,and so he called the island Nieves, meaning "snow" in Spanish. And, ofcourse, when the British took the island from the French early in the eighteenthcentury, the British called it Nevis. According to some historians,England then removed the Jews from the neighboring island of St. Christopher(St. Kitts), where they had settled, to colonize Nevis.

    When slavery ended, much of the land on Nevis was owned by theCrown. Some former slaves abandoned their assigned lots and settled oncrown lands, especially the hills. Consequently, the former slaves became,in practical effects, landowners living in their own quarters with their ownmates and offspring. So the middle-class family structure and land ownershipon Nevis began early. The population was predominantly black andmixed race. Most plantation owners left their lands and returned to England;only a few struggled on. Runaway slaves who had fled to live amongthe runaway Caribbean Indians in the hills largely remained there untilwater and electricity were made available in the villages nearer the sea inthe middle of this century. The speech patterns of these isolated individualswas a mixture of Elizabethan English, African, and Indian languages, whichhas survived to this day.

    The ending of slavery coincided with the decline of the CaribbeanIslands as the world's leading sugar-producing area. Nevis, which flourishedbecause of sugar production in the eighteenth century, had ground to apoverty-stricken halt by 1837, the year slavery officially ended. That year,my grandfather Alexander Huggins was born and christened in St. John's(also known as Fig Tree Church because it is in an area then called FigTree and now called Church Ground). His mother, the records disclosed,was Ann Wyatt, all "apprentice," who was christened at St. John's as anadult the year before. She was sometimes known as Ann Weekes. Therewere no other Wyatts in the Church records. The parents of adults whowere christened were not listed. My maternal great-grandmother apparentlyliked the surname Huggins for her firstborn, although, since he was mulatto,she may have given him the name of her former slaveholding Englishowner.

    We next discovered that Ann Brazier, my father's paternal great-grandmother,also an "apprentice," had been baptized at St. John's in 1833. Sheapparently had been a slave on Ann Brazier's estate, which lies behind thechurch in an area where my father was born in 1885. The name Braziercan be found among the early-nineteenth-century memorial plaques on thewalls of the church. The name Thomas Woolward is also memorializedthere. His daughter, Frances Nesbit, had married Lord Nelson in 1787.

    My grandfather Alexander Huggins married Jane Ann Woolward in St.John's in 1864. They had twelve children, all of whom were baptized inSt. John's except the youngest, my mother, Rachel Keziah Huggins, whowas baptized in the Methodist chapel at Brown Hill in 1887. The reasonfor this aberration was that my mother's mother had been baptized in thenewly constructed Methodist church in Charlestown, Nevis, in 1845. (Thestone building is still standing; in 1994, the church celebrated its 150thanniversary.) Jane's parents were Methodists, Thomas and Cecilia Woolwardof Clark's estate. It appears, however, that Thomas Woolward wasfirst baptized at St. John's as an adult on March 1, 1839. My motherattended the Methodist chapel in Brown Hill with her mother until itburned down about 1897. Her baptism is recorded in the separate recordfor that chapel. She and her mother then returned to St. John's, which herfather steadfastly had refused to leave on the ground that all of his forebearshad been members of that particular Anglican church. My mother's motherhad a brother or other male relative who was in charge of the chapel atBrown Hill--which probably explains her desire to attend that chapel. Itwas also much nearer, by at least three miles, to my grandmother's BrownHill home than St. John's. The Methodists originally were tormented onthe island of Nevis because of their early opposition to slavery, which accountsfor their ability to recruit former slaves in a land overrun by Anglicans.There are five Anglican churches on Nevis, all built of stone and withslave labor. Some, like St. John's, claim dates in the 1600s.

    My grandfather was a prominent citizen and church member. Mymother told me that he often was selected to serve on juries, an indicationof his standing in the community. He had a two-story house that he hadbuilt himself, according to my mother's cousin Sarah Pinney, on a low hilloverlooking the Caribbean Sea. A few of the stories from the foundationremain. The house was built on land on which my grandmother had settledafter slavery. At the time of her christening in 1836, she listed her abodeas Low Ground, an area just below my grandfather's house but considerablynearer to the sea. It is still so designated. My grandfather may have been acarpenter or builder. When parishioners were required to pay dues for theirchurch pews, my grandfather, who was older and poorer by then, madehimself a small wooden bench, which he placed in the rear of the churchand dared anyone to move. It was there undisturbed, like everything elsein Nevis, until 1976, when eighty of its returned for a Huggins familyreunion. My grandfather was, in any event, a laborer who did many things,as most island men did. When he was older, he injured his leg, whichconfined him to making lobster traps for fishermen at home, a trade thatstill goes on in the new Nevis. He died in 1917, at the age of eighty, andwas buried in the churchyard at St. John's. Jane died seven years beforehim and was also buried there.

    Ann Brazier's son, Abel Zephania Baker, named his son Moulton ZephaniaBaker. The surname Baker is also found among the 1829 memorialplaques on the walls of St. John's, which may explain why Ann Braziergave her son this surname. There were some other nonwhite Bakers amongthe parishioners at St. John's and among the Methodists in Charlestown,but our relationship to them is not clear. Bertram Baker, for example, thefirst black in the New York State Assembly from Brooklyn, was born inNevis. His wife, Irene, whose maiden name was also Baker, was born inBrooklyn. Her father was a well-known Methodist minister in Brooklynand Nevis. He also operated a small store in Charlestown that sold itemsfor schoolchildren. Many Nevisian elders remember him well for thisreason.

    My paternal grandparents, Moulton Zephania Baker and Isabella Watley,were married in St. John's in 1884. They were about twenty yearsyounger than Alexander and Jane Huggins. Their eldest son, WilloughbyAlva Baker, my father, was christened in September 1885. Isabella Watley'smother was Mary Ann Tyson. (The father of the actress Cicely Tyson is amember of the same clan.) Isabella's father was a white man, George Watley.She, however, looked like a Caribbean Indian--short, moonfaced, withlong black hair to her waist--as we can see from the only photo of aforebear in the family annals. She lived next door to St. John's Churchmost of her life and died in Nevis in 1934. A part of her house is stillstanding.

    My father had a brother, Joseph Addington Baker, and two sisters,Sadie Nellie Bell and Anna Virginia, all of whom migrated to New Havenwith my father's financial help. With the aid of both brothers, Virginiaattended Commercial High School after her arrival in 1924 at age fourteen.She graduated about 1928. She lived with her sister, Nellie, until she joinedthe Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) in 1942. Aunt Nellie hadmarried Samuel Paris, a Nevisian, and had two children, Doris and Calvin.Uncle Joe also had two children. Pearl and Ruby.

    Of my mother's eleven brothers and sisters, two brothers, Edward andJohn, came to America. Edward, who had worked on board vessels travelingbetween New York and various Caribbean Islands, settled in New York,about 1902, where he got a job as a construction worker. He then movedto New Haven in 1905, following the advice of some Yale students he hadmet in the theater district of New York who told him about the availabilityof easier service jobs there. John Huggins went to New Haven in the early1920s, stayed for a while, and then settled in Boston. He went on to fathertwenty-two children. He and his wife died in their forties. Their eldest son,Harvey, is still living in California, age eighty-five.

    One sister, Dorcas, came to the States in the early 1920s also butclaimed she could not stand the cold and returned on the next boat backto the family home on Brown Hill in Nevis, where I now have a home.

    My mother's brother Edward was followed to New Haven by one ofhis friends, my father, in 1906. My mother, having somehow accumulatedthe twenty-five-dollar steerage-class fare, came the next year. She and myfather were married that October in St. Luke's Episcopal Church, a newlyconstructed brick edifice on Whalley Avenue. I was the ninth of their twelvechildren, three of whom died in infancy before I was born in 1921. Myfather's first job was as a dishwasher at the New Haven House (a hotel onChapel Street opposite Yale) for nine dollars a week. He escaped the draftfor World War I, since, when called, he was in the New Haven Hospitalwith pleurisy.

    My uncle Edward, who had established himself in New Haven withthe aid of Charles Mills (the first Brown Hill Nevisian to come to NewHaven, in 1902), sent first for his Nevisian wife, Meloria Gilfiland, thenhis four children, John, Arlene, Josephine, and Ernest. He returned fairlyregularly to Nevis until the early 1930s, when he brought back his secondwife, Edna Sampson. (His first wife, had died about 1918.)

    Ed had Secured employment as steward of the University Club at Yaleabout 1915. He remained steward until about 1940, when it closed. Then,he moved to the new fraternity row on York Street and became steward ofZeta Psi Fraternity House, where he remained until 1946. He died in 1948at age sixty-seven. The fraternity house closed in his honor the day of thefuneral, the largest I had ever seen. John, following in his father's footsteps,became, sometime in the early 1930s, steward of the Fence Club at Yale,where he remained for fifty-two years. When I was growing up, all of mymale relatives seemed to work at one Yale eating club or another.

    My parents, as well as the others who migrated from Nevis, had thegood fortune of learning to read and write, add and subtract in what wereknown as the English Standard Schools. They also learned a trade. In Nevis,my father was a cobbler, and my mother was a seamstress. She also taughtvery young children for a year or two before coming to America. My parents'education was probably equivalent to the tenth grade in the States atthat time.

    I grew up in a lower-middle-class household, where my father was headof the house. Generally, West Indian men (particularly those from the Britishislands) wanted to demonstrate, always, that they, were as capable as anyman. They considered themselves superior to the average American Negrobecause of their education in the English Standard Schools. My father neverdiscussed race relations as such, but he always expressed his views on blackAmericans, who he thought were generally lazy, no good, undisciplined,and lacking middle-class values. (He had the same myopic view of Americanblacks as most whites.) The few friends he brought home from work wereeither white or West Indian, preferably Nevisian, with a lifestyle closer tohis own: "hardworking, law-abiding, self-respecting" people, who appearedin public with white shirts, starched collars, ties, and jackets. My fatheralways expected to find the parlor straightened up and ready for company.When he came home to rest for a couple of hours during the day, wechildren had to be as quiet as church mice.

    I was born in a three-family house on Day Street near the corner ofChapel. Our apartment was on the third floor and included two attic roomsand a hall room. Although blacks were only 2 percent of the population,the neighborhood was quite thoroughly integrated. The grammar schoolwas two short blocks away. We seemed to have no more and no less thaneveryone else. There was beautiful Edgewood Park with a playgroundnearby. There were two beaches--one at Lighthouse Point and the otherat Savin Rock with its amusement park. Fear and racial conflict were simplynot a part of the landscape.

    Just as my father kept his distance from working-class American blacks,established middle-class blacks shunned the newly arrived West Indians. Asa result, my parents' friends were largely other West Indians. My father hada friend, Henry Williams, who claimed he was born in Cuba. He laterchanged his name to Henry Enrique, so he may have been a white Hispanic,but he apparently had some black blood. His wife was from Jamaica, whereshe would have been known as a White Jamaican; she had very fair skinand reddish-brown hair. I suspect that Williams was also a White Jamaican.In Jamaica, White Jamaicans were royalty; in America, they were largelymembers of the servant class like most other immigrants. White Jamaicanswere whites who knew they had black ancestors. White Cubans, on theother hand, were white descendants of the Spaniards. Williams may havesought to take advantage of this subtlety. When necessary, this couplepassed for white. They stayed completely away from black Americans. Theyvisited with the few Jamaicans around who were also of mixed race. Theylived on Gill Street in the block behind us, which, at the time, was allwhite. (Some whites would not [Illegible] to blacks.) Williams worked as a cheflike my father. He was one of the few people my father considered a personalfriend, somebody who would drop by uninvited for conversation andusually for drinking. Their European backgrounds made these two friendsineligible for membership in the Christian Temperance Union. The Williamses'only son grew up without siblings or cousins. After World War IIand college, he married a white woman and left New Haven, like severalother young men who were similarly of mixed racial background. Williamsclaimed he had been raised as a Roman Catholic in Cuba, but later hebecame staunchly anti-Catholic, anti-religious. He occasionally had gone toSt. Luke's Episcopal Church at his wife's urging, but in the end, he didnot go to Church at all. He was a man who struggled constantly with hisracial and ethnic identity. There were times when we did not see him formonths. He eventually became ill and committed suicide by hanging. Hisself-imposed deeply restricted life in the shadows apparently drove himinsane. I have since wondered how many others who straddled both worldsalso went insane. At the very least, they all lived stress-filled lives.

    I learned from my father's constant debates with Williams that myfather was fourth-generation Anglican and had been the sexton of his churchin Nevis, as was his father before him and his younger brother after him,though he was basically not a churchgoer. However, he always went tochurch on Easter. One of my earliest recollections of my father is of anEaster Sunday when my sister Eunice and I went to church with him. Iwas six years old, maybe seven. This particular Easter Sunday, my motherstayed home with three younger children. My father aided her by combingour hair and helping us get dressed. My mother had made our dresses andcoats, and we had new patent-leather shoes, which my oldest sister, Olive,had bought us. My father went to church wearing a high silk hat, a cutawaycoat, and striped pants, the way, apparently, the British in Nevis dressedon Easter Sunday. The Nevisians were simply more British than the British.We got to church late and had to walk down the center aisle and sit in thefront row. There we were, Eunice and I, trailing behind our proud WestIndian father.

    My mother was a tolerant, peace-seeking person, who did not havestrong views on race and never disparaged any ethnic group. She understoodwell America's basic creed of equality. When all of her children had finallygrown up, my mother felt free to go to church, as my father said, "everytime the church door opens." In New Haven, the church was not only thehouse of God but the center for social intercourse. My mother became veryactive in the Woman's Auxiliary and United Churchwomen, a statewidegroup of Episcopalian woman. In 1936, she became the first woman electedto an Episcopal Church vestry. My father, on the other hand, did notbelong to any church groups. Men generally did not participate in churchin the same way women did. The men (no women) acted as acolytes andsang with the women in the choir, but my father did none of, those. Hecould not sing or chose not to. (I guess that explains why I cannot singand why I got all F in Music in the third grade. I was deeply shaken bythis. I was finally put out of the church choir.)

Continues...

Excerpted from Equal Justice Under Lawby Constance Baker Motley Copyright © 1999 by Constance Baker Motley. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374526184
• ISBN 13: 9780374526184
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288