The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is celebrating the legacy of barrier-breaking attorney, elected official and judge Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005).
Motley was a student at Columbia Law School in 1945 when she began working for the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Between 1945 to 1965, Motley worked on about 60 cases that reached the Supreme Court – she won nine of the 10 cases and was the first Black woman to argue before the Court.
In 1964, she became the first Black woman elected to the New York State Senate. In February 1965, she was chosen as the first woman to serve as Manhattan Borough President; she was elected to a full four-year term later that year. President Lyndon B. Johnson nominated Motley to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1966, becoming the first Black female federal judge. She became a chief judge in 1982 and senior judge in 1986.
During her lifetime, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and received the Presidential Citizens Medal and the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal. In 2006, she was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal. Her former second home in Chester, Connecticut, was designated as a site on the Connecticut Freedom Trail in 2019.
The new stamp features a portrait of Motley by artist Charly Palmer, based on an Associated Press photograph, and is the 47th entry in the USPS’ Black Heritage series. The stamp will be issued in panes of 20 as a Forever stamp on Jan. 31.
